Cassidy Blowers knew from a young age that she would pursue some kind of career related to construction. “As a kid I enjoyed playing in sand piles with Tonka trucks,” recalls the director of construction resources for the Delaware Department of Transportation.
An initial idea to design roller coasters gave way to transportation through an internship with the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation while studying transportation engineering at Penn State. He would later join DelDOT.
“I always wanted to digitize what we had at DelDOT,” Blowers says. “In 2008, we were still using a lot of paper processes. I wanted to modernize that.” The agency, with the help of grants from the Federal Highway Administration through the Every Day Counts program, launched initiatives such as an electronic ticketing system that tracks trucks delivering materials to job sites using the HaulHub Technologies app.
When a construction worker in a neighboring state died in a road work zone accident, Blowers and his team were encouraged to start another pilot program.
“We have all this location data with e-tickets,” he says. “So we thought, can we get notifications? [the public] that you are entering a separate work area [with standard road] signs?”
DelDOT partnered with its counterparts in Louisiana, Iowa and Nebraska; contractor Greggo & Ferrara Inc.; and HaulHub on what became Accelerating Digital Inspection Practices with Connected Machinery (ADCMS). The contractor offered its fleet of digitally connected machinery for the demonstration phase. Potential road hazards are monitored in real time thanks to data extracted from electronic tickets, connected machines and their telematic data on activity and material deliveries. Drivers are automatically alerted to active construction work zones through their GPS navigation applications and the FHWA Work Zone Data Exchange.
Joel VanDusen, HaulHub’s director of government solutions, wrote in an article for the American Highway and Transportation Builders Association that the project “marks a significant shift in workforce development within the construction industry. By equipping workers with advanced tools and a comprehensive data-driven perspective, DelDOT is creating a more modernized and sophisticated workplace that resonates with the digital workforce.”
“Cassidy led the team that worked with vendors, established peer exchanges and led communication to ensure ADCMS was a huge success,” says Cedric Wilkinson, Iowa Department of Transportation e-Build Program Administrator. “I worked with Cassidy to share ideas about how Iowa DOT uses electronic entry.”
DelDOT is now looking to use statewide data from 600 pieces of its own fleet of connected equipment to inform the planning and construction of future projects, including reducing its carbon footprint.
Blowers foresees the potential for AI to help teams better manage the “shipload” of data from e-tickets, traffic and weather reports, connected equipment telematics and other variables. Then, he says, “instead of measuring and calculating what was done, [inspectors] it can only verify what the team already says has been done.”
Other possibilities could include providing work zone data for autonomous vehicles to adjust their routes automatically. “We are having discussions with [equipment makers] trying to drive the adoption of additional sensors,” Blowers says. “We want to be able to take that information and use it to make life easier for us and the contractors.
