| Heave induced infrastructure distress hazard and risk analyses play a major role in identifying the potential consequences of soil heaving both in relation to existing facilities as well as in the planning and location of new infrastructure. Such analyses must include detailed information about site-specific geological and geotechnical conditions, and thus a large number of input factors and variables are needed. The resulting databases may be quite large and require an appropriate computer-based environment to optimize evaluation procedures. The lack of such an appropriate computer-based environment to perform these types of analyses, in the Engineering Division/Department of the City of Arlington, has driven motivation for the present work.; Recent advances in computer-based Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have provided a technology, which is ideally suited to fulfill the needs of heave induced civil infrastructure distress hazard and risk analysis. The overall objective of the present work is to integrate a variety of GIS-based spatial analysis procedures for identifying and mapping potential soil heave-induced civil infrastructure distress hazards in the City of Arlington using the computational capabilities offered by PC-supported ARC-Info and ARC-View softwares. This will deliver a comprehensive, user-friendly GIS database that will benefit city transportation officials and local utility companies, emergency planning agencies, private industry, insurance companies, and consulting engineers and architects, among many other potential users. |
