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Volume 15, Number 3 |
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Closer to home: MEng projects in Arlington, MAAlong with projects in Nepal, Haiti, England, and Lebanon, MEng students helped out locally in Arlington, MA. CEE senior lecturer George Kocur, who coincidentally lives in Arlington, described three Information Technology projects with the town government.
Contractors and utilities which have to dig up streets will be able to obtain permits over the Internet instead of in person, thanks to a Web pavement permit system built by Andreas Klimke, Leon Qi and Rajesh Prasad. Utilities can send drawing files to the Arlington Web server and will receive a permit via the Web. The Town does not have to staff the engineering office to handle these permits, a substantial savings in personnel, and the permits are issued more quickly. Referring to the complete database of Arlington streets, the Town can restrict streets from being worked on, and manage the system overall. The system was in testing and training this summer and will go live in the fall.
A pavement management system will rely on the Web, Palm personal digital assistants and the Global Positioning System (GPS). Constructed by William Cheung, Anthony Yim, Wesley Choi and Warit Durondej, this system allows the Town to inspect streets by driving around and recording pavement defects on a Palm device connected to a GPS receiver giving real-time location information. As the operator clicks with a stylus on icons representing the various defects, the Palm/GPS combination can associate the defects with a particular street. This replaces a system based on walking the street with a clipboard and then entering all the data manually. The MIT system then uploads the data from the Palm to a Web server, where a pavement management system computes and displays the condition of each street, estimates the costs and benefits of pavement management actions, and suggests the most effective one. This summer Arlington will use the Palm/GPS to do its first full inspection of town streets in 12 years.
A water management system built by Sebastian Bogershausen, Mameet Khanolkar and Brad Butler will be based on the Web. Arlington is installing 800 wireless water meters this year and plans to install wireless meters on the remaining 11,500 residences and businesses next year. The MIT system obtains data from the wireless meters as often as every 10 minutes and can use it to manage and monitor the water system much more effectively than the current system, which reads meters once every six months.
For example, the new system can detect leaks by monitoring water use in the middle of the night to see if it ever reaches zero, and by comparing the total of Arlington's meter readings to the Mass. Water Resources Authority meters that distribute water to the town. It can detect theft by finding meters with negative readings or loss of connectivity with the wireless unit, meter deterioration, and other issues. The system is a prototype and we plan to complete it next year when the wireless meters go into operation.
All three projects were done with the Arlington Department of Public Works. The students met with the Arlington engineering staff weekly during the fall and biweekly in the spring, to go through the entire software development process from inception, design, development, test, customer interaction, documentation, training and implementation. While taking the bus to Arlington wasn't the same kind of field trip as, say, going to Nepal, the students had a good time with these projects.
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"Civil and Environmental Engineering at
MIT"
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