Tech and Analytic Techniques Give Damage Assessment a Boost

Imagine trying to maintain the upkeep on nearly 25 million acres of land, vast installations of buildings, structures, roads, electrical and plumbing systems, and much more. That’s what the Department of Defense does every day—with its cumulative worldwide footprint. Many of the infrastructure components and subcomponents on military installations are in locations subject to hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, and the like, and even being vulnerable to enemy attacks.

When any piece of infrastructure at a military base or installation is damaged or fails to operate properly—for example, an electrical system goes down, a fuel storage tank or water pipe starts leaking, or training sites, roadways, or runways are damaged—that organization’s operational capabilities are weakened and its mission capabilities threatened. The ability to rapidly assess and repair damaged infrastructure is critical to mission sustainment.

To do that, assessment teams are sent out to physically observe and evaluate each building, tower, road, pipeline, and the like. Teams sometimes travel across thousands of acres that may include rugged or remote terrain. These assessments are time intensive, costly, and subjective, and subject to data issues that weaken assessments and undermine effective decision making.

In Booz Allen’s viewpoint Improve the Damage Assessment of Your Military Installation, our experts outline a better way to assess military installations, relying more on autonomous data collection platforms (e.g., unmanned aerial vehicles [UAV]), multispectral sensors, cloud computing, advanced analytics, and visualization.

“Applied together, these advanced technologies offer many opportunities to accelerate the data collection process, enrich existing data, and create new efficiencies and solutions that go far beyond the 1950s-style damage assessment methods currently in place,” says David Bragg, Booz Allen’s civil and environmental engineering co-lead. “For example, UAVs and other data collection platforms, combined with next-generation analytics and data visualization, can anchor a more efficient, accurate, and timely assessment approach—and at a substantially lower cost than physical inspection teams.”

Capitalizing on these new technologies will require a new approach to assessing damaged infrastructure, analyzing the data, and presenting the results to decision makers.

“The goal isn’t simply to collect more data but, more importantly, to replace outdated practices with more powerful, cost-efficient methods, while also leveraging existing data sources,” says David.

To learn more, download the full viewpoint today.