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Jessica Boakye and Egemen Okte, assistant professors of civil and environmental engineering, have received the $40,000 Armstrong Fund for Science award to study how social equity considerations can be incorporated into infrastructure management decisions, focusing on road pavement conditions.

The Armstrong Fund for Science is awarded by the Office of Research and Engagement to researchers willing to challenge conventions in their field.

“It’s a constant optimization puzzle that we have to solve,” says Boakye. “[We want to] holistically understand the different ways that maintenance and operation decisions impact people’s lives,” she says. “The project aims to develop a framework that can both understand what those impacts are and combine them for making decisions on which roads to prioritize.”

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While there are algorithms that help identify the roads that should get repaired, this is largely based on condition, traffic and cost, but when it comes to deciding which road segments to repair and how, that is a human decision, says Okte. “You can’t just come up with an algorithm that will work in every single city, in every single town.”

Taking too narrow of a view has significant downsides. “For instance, you shouldn’t focus only on the poor ones, because we have a bunch of fair ones that are eventually going to get to poor and it’s way less expensive and efficient to maintain or preserve than it is to fix something that’s already degraded,” explains Boakye.

Currently, these final decisions are made by people who already consider far more factors than just road conditions. However, these factors have not been formalized, which is what this new research seeks to address.

“We want to understand: when people make these decisions, how do they actually pick which roads to fix?” says Okte. “And perhaps, how our framework could formalize some of these decisions.”

Some factors that they have already identified as areas to explore include financial impacts on local businesses as well as safety and comfort considerations, as they describe in their recent research published in the journal Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives.

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“Everyone wants their roads to be fixed, but nobody wants to live in a construction zone,” says Boakye. With this in mind, her work will determine, for these new decision-making parameters, what is considered tolerable. For instance, a short-term diversion of traffic might have a minimal impact on local businesses, but if it goes on for too long, that may reach an unacceptable or unsustainable level.

Ultimately, they aim to simulate different kinds of maintenance operations so that they can understand the optimal decision-making process and begin to consider how their newly identified parameters could fit into a decision-making workflow.

“The road is for everyone,” says Boakye. “One of the things about modern society that’s amazing is that we’re able to connect in ways that we just couldn’t before — but that’s assuming that you can kind of use this infrastructure.” This research aims to broaden the known challenges that construction brings in order to minimize them.

The Armstrong Fund for Science was established to encourage faculty at UMass Amherst to pursue research that has a significant likelihood of major science or engineering impact. Made possible through the generosity of John and Elizabeth Armstrong, the fund was created in 2006 with the belief that major scientific advances in society can be achieved by supporting researchers with bold vision, documented credentials and a passion for results. Grants are made from this fund, administered by the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Engagement, on an annual basis.

For more information the Armstrong Fund, or to apply for the 2026 grant, visit the Research and Engagement website.