Consuming Pavement Engineering Research through Software: An Empirical Investigation of Software Value in Transportation Agency Practices

Abstract

State transportation agencies have an established interest in funding pavement research that inform design and construction best practices. Seldom however does research result in development efforts that mobilize their findings into digital services (e.g. software or web-based applications), despite their perceived benefits in such form. When pavement research does result in software, tools are often limited in scope and may not be practice-ready despite their potential as proofs of concept. Consequently, research-based software is rarely the subject of further research and it is unclear whether additional investigations would result in additional academic or business value. This dissertation discusses how state agencies might further extend the value of research by translating its contents into to digital, web-based services and subsequently, benefit from its consumption. Ultimately, the body of work applies the findings from three separate research efforts to recommend best practices for managing and mobilizing research knowledge into practice. To establish the state of practice, the research begins with an empirical assessment of research knowledge, information technology, and software consumption patterns among transportation agencies. The work then identifies and characterizes how users consume research knowledge through web-based mediums by examining the performance of two existing web-based services. These efforts inform the development of a research and web-based decision support tool, which aims to document and identify how value is produced in the process of strategically translating research into development-ready formats. This third study identifies software characteristics and competencies that can be used to assess how effectively a software (or service) enables it consumers to leverage research concepts. Finally, this research synthesizes the findings from the three investigations to address specific research concepts the pavement industry has historically struggled to incorporate into workflows as digital support tools. The outcomes examined include how software development may add value to existing research efforts by improving the analytical capacity of its end-users as well as accessibility to research knowledge.