Planning Grant: Engineering Research Center for Intelligent Infrastructure for Safe, Efficient and Resilient Mobility (ERC-I2SERM)

The Planning Grants for Engineering Research Centers competition was run as a pilot solicitation within the ERC program. Planning grants are not required as part of the full ERC competition, but intended to build capacity among teams to plan for convergent, center-scale engineering research.

This planning grant award supports the design of an Engineering Research Center (ERC) focused upon potentially transformative science and engineering research that promises to make our roadways safer, more reliable, more efficient, and more environmentally sustainable. This research will stimulate the transformation of the way we travel and deliver goods and services. Roadways and highways are not only national economic lifelines but impact every sphere of societal activities. Next generation transportation infrastructure must have sufficient capacity, making it able to grow with the increasing demand and address the emerging connected, automated and shared vehicle technologies. It should also be resistant to interruptions, able to withstand all manner of regional natural hazards. Finally, it must be aesthetic, have negligible environmental impact, and use minimal resources. These interrelated demands present an opportunity for a new era of intelligent transportation infrastructure based on new materials, sensing and automation, and greater interactions with the world. We imagine future highway and roadway systems which extensively utilize cutting-edge (smart) materials, smart and adaptable infrastructure, smart transportation systems and physics-guided data science to achieve safety, resiliency, and efficiency. Such an intelligent infrastructure will be able to sense, interpret and interact in real time with its environment. This allows for anticipation and adjustment to external stimuli, such as those posed by traffic and extreme events. The planning grant activities will provide the platform for identification of key technical challenges, their potential solution hypotheses, and the disciplinary contributions that will lead to formation of the most effective ERC.

To identify key technical challenges to resilient transportation infrastructure, the planning team will engage deeply with stakeholders and domain experts. This will be done through a dedicated workshop, panel discussion(s) and a team building retreat. The results of these engagements will form the basis for fine tuning the technical topics and coordination of the research agenda across the core areas and to define the linkages among the disciplines. The expected outcome will be identification of a set of critical research issues and a broad yet convergent research program. This allows for a clear definition of the structure and roles within this envisioned multi-university center. These planning activities will also define the ways the center will be able to represent diverse institutions from the viewpoint of geography, types of students served (including minority students) as well as their location in or near major metropolitan areas. The planned stakeholder engagement, workshop, and retreat are expected to impact the outlook of academic investigators towards these societal challenges, as well as how the stakeholders (e.g., industrial innovators, policymakers, citizens) perceive scientific research. The planning activities will also engage graduate and undergraduate students to provide them exposure to emerging transdisciplinary research opportunities.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.