Long-Term Bridge Performance (LTBP) InfoBridge

January 2019 marked the release of the Long-Term Bridge Performance (LTBP) Program’s InfoBridge™ web portal, a newly developed website for dissemination and visualization of bridge data, information, and products developed by the LTBP Program. The portal’s main purpose is to leverage the analytical capability of the highway bridge research community and fulfill the Federal Highway Administration’s (FHWA’s) responsibility to provide transparency and ready access to data collected through Federal research programs. InfoBridge also enables bridge owners with no or limited access to bridge asset management software to manage their bridge inventories through a seamless user interface that incorporates state of the art querying and visualization tools. For more information visit https://infobridge.fhwa.dot.gov.

Figure 1. Screen Capture InfoBridge ™ Web Portal (Source: FHWA)

InfoBridge™ includes several productivity features many of which are the results of the research conducted by the LTBP Program. For the features generated through the LTBP Program research, hyperlinks are provided below for detailed information on the Tools and Products page. The main InfoBridge features include the following: 

• Bridge Selection: Users can select bridges through a combination of filters including Find Bridges, Advanced Find, Map Find, Chart Find
• Find Bridges: A data filter providing the most commonly used selection options from a series of data sources including National Bridge Inventory (NBI), National Bridge Element (NBE), LTBP, and Experimental Projects.
• Advance Find: This filter provides more in-depth attributes than the basic Find Bridges filter to query for bridges based on NBI and NBE data, Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) and political district boundaries, and data from special projects.
• Map Find: An interactive map interface allowing users to draw various shapes on the map to select bridges that are located within or outside the drawn boundaries.
• Chart Find: Provides a summary of data availability for the selected bridges in a bar chart.
• Map: This interface geographically plots selected bridges on a base map.
• Performance History: Provides a snapshot of the performance statistics for the selected bridges in tables and bar charts. It also graphs the historical bridge performance by number, percentage, and percentage of deck area for the selected subset of bridges.
• Charts: Provide an interactive interface to plot one-variable and two-variable analytical charts using various bridge attributes to discover potential meaningful patterns in the data.
• Bridge Condition by State: Displays percentage of bridges in good and poor condition by count and by deck area for each state on an interactive map and a searchable table. By hovering over each state, bridge performance information for that state is displayed.
• Library: The Library feature provides access to InfoBridge Documentation, InfoBridge Update Notes, LTBP Documentation, Historical Spec Changes, and the Annual Student Data Analysis Contest.
• The following tools available in InfoBridge are the results of the research conducted by the LTBP Program. Detailed description of these tools is available under LTBP Tools and Products.
  • Bridge Components Condition Forecast Models.
  • Bridge Network Performance Forecast Models.
  • Bridge Performance Transition Forecast.
  • Asset Value Calculation.
  • Historical Specification Changes.