Research at FHWA

A majority of FHWA's programs are aimed at applied research defined by incremental improvements that will lower construction and maintenance costs, improve system performance, add highway capacity, reduce highway fatalities and injuries, reduce adverse environmental impacts, and achieve other user benefits.

However, FHWA also has engaged in its share of advanced research, which focused on longer term, higher risk opportunities with the potential to dramatically change the way the United States builds, maintains, and safely operates the Nation's transportation system. The Turner-Fairbanks Highway Research Center in McLean, VA, continues to lead an ongoing advanced and applied/problem-solving research program, grounded in stakeholder needs. Many of the technologies developed from advanced research are used in the field today.

For example, researchers under contract with FHWA discovered that nondestructive testing of steel structures based on the principle of magnetostrictive sensing can be used to measure tension in individual cables. Follow-on, applied research led to the commercial development of a technology that is changing conventional methods for inspecting suspension cables and monitoring tensile stresses in new ropes.

Similarly, nondestructive testing and detection of bridge damage is possible today using fiber-optic sensor systems, also a result of advanced research studies. And advanced studies of core behavioral algorithms to describe the interactions of multimodal travelers, vehicles, and highway systems have resulted in the creation of next generation simulation (NGSIM) core algorithms and datasets. Researchers are using the validated, open-source algorithms developed under the NGSIM program to create more realistic simulations of traffic patterns. View these results in more depth in the article "A Decade of Achievement" in the November/December 2002 issue of Public Roads.