The purpose of this thesis was to study the reliability and the accuracy of GPS positioning in Palm Beach and Broward counties.

The ability to predict the deterioration pattern of bridges can assist decision makers in determining when and whether to ignore, refurbish/rehabilitate, or replace a bridge. This dissertation formulates and applies two models, one deterministic and the other probabilistic, capable of predicting...

Depending on the contractual arrangement, fluctuations in materials prices expose different parties involved in a construction contract to various degrees of risk. In general, owners and/or contractors face the risk of losses when the prices of materials move upwards. Suppliers, on the other...

The Gauss-Marquardt-Levenberg (GML) method of computer-based parameter estimation, in common with other gradient-based approaches, suffers from the drawback that it may become trapped in local objective function minima, and thus report optimized parameter values that are not, in fact, optimized...

Many methods for highway cost allocation procedures have been adopted previously by all levels of government; local, state, and federal. However, they rarely address the issue of long span bridge allocation properly, simply treating these unique structures as the typical short span bridge. This...

The move towards commercialization and privatization has pressured airports to become more productive and competitive. The need to devise an overall (total) productivity measure is increasingly important in airport business. The dissertation made three major research contributions. First, it...

This thesis analyzes and compares the effects of different objectives and financial constraints on conventional and flexible route bus systems, with special emphasis on the relation between subsidy and social welfare. Social welfare is the sum of producer surplus (profit) and consumer surplus...

The aging of bridges and traffic volume increase result in deterioration of bridge conditions and consequently increased risks to bridges and users. Highway agencies in the United States face challenges because of lack of sufficient resources to maintain bridges in good conditions. Current...

Projects are commonly over budget and behind schedule, to some extent because uncertainties are not accounted for in cost and schedule estimates. Research and practice is now addressing this problem, often by using Monte Carlo methods to simulate the effect of variances in work package costs and...