Introduction

This book presents a new vision and way of designing and managing the civil infrastructure of the nation. Someday perhaps in the not-too-distant future our structures

will be smart and our freeways will be intelligent. This book aims towards that goal and

presents the foundations of intelligent infrastructure. It presents novel technologies, methodologies, and detailed computational algorithms for creation of smart structures

and intelligent freeways. The two fields of structural engineering and transportation engineering are

considered separate fields within civil engineering. This book provides a unique treatise

for attacking and solving some of the most complex and intractable problems

encountered in the emerging fields of intelligent transportation systems (ITS) and smart

structures. A thesis of this book is that some of these problems can be solved only through ingenious integration of several different computing paradigms including chaos

theory (based on nonlinear dynamics theory), wavelets (a signal processing method), and

three complementary soft computing methods, that is, fuzzy logic, neural networks, and

genetic algorithm. The book advances a holistic approach to the creation of the intelligent

infrastructure by covering both smart structures and ITS. It crosses the two disciplines

and breaks their boundaries. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 are introductory chapters covering three fields that have

created a lot of excitement in the research community during the past two decades. Chapter 2 provides an introduction to the field of artificial neural networks. Commonly

used neural network approaches such as backpropagation (BP), radial basis function (RBF), and Boltzmann neural networks are presented followed by a brief discussion of the dynamic neural network employed and advanced in several chapters in the book. Chapter 3 introduces the readers to wavelets for signal processing. The fundamental topic of multiresolution analysis is presented followed by the more recent and powerful concept of wavelet packets. The key ideas of the chaos theory such as state space, time

delay, and embedding dimension along with three illustrative examples are presented in Chapter 4.