Honors Theses and Capstones

Date of Award

Spring 2025

Project Type

Senior Honors Thesis

College or School

CEPS

Department

Civil and Environmental Engineering

Program or Major

Civil Engineering

Degree Name

Bachelor of Science

First Advisor

Fei Han

Second Advisor

Weiwei Mo

Abstract

In this paper, infrastructure asset management was explored, particularly culvert management, with the main objective being the investigation of culvert management plans nationally in the United States of America. These documents were collected, categorized for context, and evaluated for the addressing of increasingly important concepts for modern times. These research parameters, prioritization strategy, social equity, and climate change, were then compared to two other considerations to create more inferences and potential conclusions: geographical region and political ideology. A statistical analysis was then conducted spearheaded by Spearman’s correlation, a test that measured the strength of a potential correlation between two variables. The overwhelming takeaway from this study was that most national culvert management plans did not adequately mention prioritization strategies, social equity, and climate change, but there was also not ample evidence to suggest that this behavior was associated with the category, geographical region, or political ideology of the states that the plan originated from. While the results generated were deemed statistically insignificant, they highlighted the inconsistencies and the need for improvement in the development and updates of culvert management plans. In totality, the importance of infrastructure asset management, and culvert management specifically, are crucial to the convenient nature and progression of the world, and more consistency needs to be witnessed within these documents to act in ways that are beneficial not only in the short-term present, but to develop sustainable solutions for the long-term as well.

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