Semester

Summer

Date of Graduation

2021

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Type

MS

College

Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Resources

Department

Civil and Environmental Engineering

Committee Chair

Yoojung Yoon

Committee Member

Fei Dai

Committee Member

Kakan Dey

Abstract

The concept of a smart city has emerged as a solution to resolve various urban challenges by applying advanced systems for the functions of the city (e.g., environment, economy, infrastructure, governance, and people). Urban infrastructure with the use of modern technologies, such as Information Communication Technology and the Internet of Things, plays an essential role in enhancing the capability of the city to resolve the challenges. Particularly, urban roads supported by advanced systems with modern technologies serve as a principal bedrock to establish a smart city. Witnessing the benefits from intelligent urban roads has promoted city stakeholders to make investment decisions in innovating their road facilities (i.e., roadway and roadside facilities) with advanced systems. The investment decisions to be efficient start from understanding the current development status of urban roads to identify the needs for advanced systems. Therefore, the objective of this thesis was to present a framework to prioritize advanced systems identified by assessing the current development status of urban roads for innovation. The current development status assessment can be done using the hierarchy table of indicators and measures developed by this thesis. As a hierarchy table organizes various elements in parent-child relationships, the hierarchy table developed consists of three levels: smart city components, indicators, and measures. The smart city components are the result of a synthesis study that reviewed various smart city indexes. The keyword network analysis, one of the text mining techniques, was used to develop the indicators and measures. The measures at the lowest hierarch level are considered to identify advanced systems that enhance the current development status of urban roads. The prioritization framework uses the cost-effectiveness values of advanced systems that are combined by the weights at the component and indicator levels. The effectiveness values of advanced systems need a normalization because they are in different scales and units in general. The process of the presented prioritization framework was demonstrated by employing a hypothetical example. The contributions of this thesis include: 1) the development of the hierarchy table of indicators and measures that can dedicate to evaluating the current development status of urban roads and identifying advanced systems for urban road innovation, and 2) the hierarchy table development process can be applied to developing indicators and measures focusing other individual service areas. 3) The advanced system prioritization framework can increase efficiency in investing city-wide resources in highly needed and valuable advanced systems, and 4) be applied to any type of urban infrastructure due to the practicality of the weight estimation method.

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