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As Canadians hit the road this summer, the many highway bridges they cross help keep people, communities and businesses connected. 

But the country’s bridges face growing pressure from aging infrastructure and climate-related hazards. 

To help address that challenge, , PhD, a bridge engineer and associate professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at the 91°µÍø½ûÇø's , has received a five-year, $235,000 from the (NSERC).

will develop a framework to help engineers make smarter decisions about repairing and strengthening Canada's highway bridges.

A smarter way to strengthen bridges 

"Highway bridges are the lifelines of the country," says Billah. 

With thousands of bridges across Canada, rebuilding them all would be prohibitively expensive, making retrofits a more practical and sustainable long-term solution. 

That raises a new challenge: How do engineers decide which bridges should be repaired first, and which retrofit strategy will have the greatest impact? 

Billah’s answer is the Resilience-Informed Retrofit Design (RIRD) framework. 

The framework helps engineers prioritize repairs by considering a bridge's condition, the hazards it could face, repair costs and long-term performance. 

Unlike traditional approaches that often focus on a single hazard, RIRD considers those factors together, giving engineers a more complete picture before investing in repairs. 

Using AI to make better decisions 

Generative AI is a key part of the project. 

Billah's team will first develop computer models and conduct laboratory experiments to better understand how bridges perform under different hazards.  

Those models will then be checked against the lab results before being used to generate the large datasets needed to train the AI models. 

Once trained, the AI models will help engineers predict how an existing bridge is likely to perform under different hazard scenarios and compare potential retrofit strategies before work begins. 

Rather than replacing engineering expertise, the technology will help engineers make faster, better-informed decisions. 

Turning research into action 

Billah was one of 95 UCalgary faculty members to receive NSERC Discovery Grants, which were .  

The award will support Billah’s project while creating opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students, along with a postdoctoral researcher to help develop the framework. 

"This definitely opens up a great opportunity for my research team to explore this new area," he says. 

For Billah, however, success isn't measured by developing another research tool. 

"Whatever we are doing, if it is not being implemented into practice, then there is no value to it," he says. 

Billah says early conversations with industry partners have been encouraging. 

He hopes engineers, governments and infrastructure owners will eventually use the framework to make more informed decisions about when and where bridge repairs will have the greatest impact. 

Other UCalgary projects funded through the NSERC Discovery Grants program are advancing research in areas ranging from brain health and quantum computing to sustainable energy, agriculture and space science. 

Looking beyond Canada 

The project is being developed with Canada's transportation network in mind, but Billah hopes its impact won't end there. 

"Initially, our target is to develop it for a Canadian context, but definitely our goal is to make it globally acceptable," Billah says. 

For Canadians hitting the road this summer, that global ambition begins at home, with bridges designed to remain safe and reliable for years to come.