Abstract
<p><span style="font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: medium;">Infrastructure managers require timely and accurate state information to diagnose, prioritize, and repair the substantial infrastructure assets supporting modern society. Challenges in obtaining sufficient information can often be attributed to inadequate data collection procedures (phone calls, paper reports, etc.) or a general lack of knowledge or ability on the part of the reporting individual to accurately convey what is actually wrong with the facility. Fortunately, modern smart-phone technology offers the potential to improve maintenance work requests by providing better geolocation and problem description accuracy. An experiment simulating real-world maintenance requests was conducted comparing smart-phones with traditional verbal work order request systems. Usefulness and description accuracy ratios revealed smartphone systems generated more useful information regardless of submitter background or experience. However, interestingly the smart-phone applications did not improve asset geolocation and actually negatively impacted the ability of maintenance personnel to accurately relocate the asset needing service. Given the ubiquitous nature of smartphone technology, the potential exists to turn any citizen into an infrastructure sensor. This study takes a step toward understanding the benefits, as well as the limitations, of the smart-phone based work order submission systems.</span></p>
Highlights
Given various infrastructure assets seemingly fail on a daily basis, rapid identification and immediate reaction is the critical antidote toward guaranteeing sound facilities for continued operations [1]
Hypothesis 3 suggested that GPS services inherent in the smartphone would help improve the geolocation of the maintenance issue, the results indicate the exact opposite, no support exists for hypothesis 3
The results of this study indicate smartphone-based mobile work order submission systems may allow individuals to submit more useful problem descriptions regardless of how much familiarity the submitter has with civil engineering or maintenance procedures
Summary
Given various infrastructure assets seemingly fail on a daily basis, rapid identification and immediate reaction is the critical antidote toward guaranteeing sound facilities for continued operations [1]. Do smartphone-based mobile work order submission applications allow non-maintenance oriented individuals to transmit more useful information than traditional systems?. Two key requirements for generating work orders include the ability to locate the problem (geolocation) and description accuracy. Evaluation of these two areas starts with customer submission and ends with how useful maintenance personnel find the information for diagnosing the type and extent of the repair. While it is well known that individuals have difficulty geographically describing just one item in the pattern, it becomes even more difficult when their perceived location is different that their actual location [5] [6] [7]
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