Susquehanna Civil - PennDOT ECMS Data Knowledgebase Project

Susquehanna Civil Inc. is a Pennsylvania-based civil engineering firm that supports transportation agencies across the Commonwealth. A critical part of our business development and strategic planning relies on understanding how the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT) selects engineering firms—specifically through design agreement data published in PennDOT’s Engineering Construction Management System (ECMS), including consultant selection results, rankings, scoring criteria, and award justifications. Today, this information is publicly available but highly fragmented, manually collected, and stored in disconnected spreadsheets and PDFs, making longitudinal analysis time-consuming and error-prone.


This project will explore the design and development of a system to automate the extraction, organization, and use of PennDOT ECMS data using a combination of traditional programming techniques and, where appropriate, AI-assisted methods. Students will evaluate approaches such as web scraping, structured data storage, and tagging/annotation of unstructured documents (e.g., PDFs containing selection narratives). The end goal is a usable prototype that enables querying trends (e.g., selection criteria emphasis by district, winning firm strategies, designation of design vs. construction awards) while maintaining data accuracy and transparency. The project is exploratory in nature and offers students flexibility to determine the most effective technical approach while working with real-world, non-sensitive public-sector data. Students will have latitude to assess where AI adds value versus deterministic methods, particularly in summarizing unstructured selection narratives and identifying recurring themes in PennDOT evaluation language