NEXCO EAST new joint research with the University of Tokyo
To do

-Toward the realization of the SMH concept-

March 26, 2014
East Nippon Expressway Co., Ltd.

NEXCO EAST (Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo) and the University of Tokyo (Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo) aim to improve the operation and maintenance business using ICT, and signed the "Research Cooperation Agreement on Information Society Infrastructure" signed in January 2011. It continued on March 25, 2014. Based on this, we will start a new joint research with the Ubiquitous Information Society Infrastructure Research Center (Director: Prof. Ken Sakamura).

Through this research, NEXCO EAST will lead to the realization of the Smart Maintenance Highway (hereinafter referred to as "SMH") concept.

1 Past achievements

(1) Bridge inspection support system Attachment 1 [PDF: 836KB]

  • Deformation evaluation support using large-capacity image analysis technology*
  • Automatic collection of inspection positions etc. using position recognition technology
  • Co-Investigator Professor Miki Haseyama, Graduate School of Information Science, Hokkaido University

(2) Coaching manual for detailed inspection Attachment 2 [PDF: 450KB]

  • Skill improvement program based on behavior analysis of skilled inspection engineers

2 New joint research

SMH concept [PDF: 246KB] Focusing on the "data utilization" that is the core of the, we will proceed with research on the following two main themes.

(1) Analysis and improvement of maintenance management business processes and systems
In order to improve the maintenance of Expressway, monitoring to be introduced in the future in the basic cycle of "inspection", "deformation judgment/evaluation", "repair plan", "design", "construction" Need to be added to work more organically. We will accumulate a large amount of data generated at each of these stages, examine it using analysis methods such as mining, and build a system that utilizes that data.

(2) Visualization of important information based on data analysis
Based on the above-mentioned large amount of data, we will examine important management indicators for early understanding of "problems" or "signs" of Expressway structures by data analysis, and utilize them for priority of measures and investment decisions. I will.

For the research, NEXCO EAST will provide data on maintenance, NEXCO EAST and the University of Tokyo will jointly analyze data and improve the system, and NEXCO EAST will verify the entire system.

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