Semantic System for Stakeholder-Conscious Infrastructure Project Planning and Design

Abstract

There is an increasing recognition of the importance of incorporating social equity into transportation infrastructure system decision-making. This paper presents a semantic, ontology-based system for stakeholder-conscious infrastructure project planning and design. The ontology offers a semantic model for representing and reasoning about the stakeholders of transportation projects, the benefits generated by transportation projects, and the analysis of the social equity of transportation projects based on stakeholder input and expected benefits. The theoretical foundation of the proposed equity analysis is grounded in the area of social welfare theory. The ontology was verified and validated using automated consistency checking, automated redundancy checking, expert evaluation, and real-life case study evaluation. The proposed ontology-based system may support infrastructure system decision-making by assessing the social (group) welfare based on the economic, social, and environmental benefits of transportation project alternatives and taking stakeholder preferences into account, and may lead to better identification of the alternative(s) that offer the highest social welfare.