The critical and transport infrastructure are not only susceptible to ageing but also to the consequences of natural disasters. They are also sensitive to human-induced/man-made/anthropogenic disasters. In many cases, the large extent and complexity of the infrastructure, its physically dispersed and decentralized nature, the many public and private entities involved in its operations, the critical importance of cost considerations, and the inherent requirement of convenient accessibility to its services by all users make the infrastructure particularly vulnerable to security and safety threats.
On the other hand, interdependencies exist between the sectors based on the critical infrastructures (energy, transport, communication,..) and nearly every other sector of the economy, and the effective operation of these systems is essential to the national and transnational economic productivity and society aspects. In this frame, it is necessary to mitigate the cascading effects, which can be triggered by crisis events.
In this framework, it is of timely interest a research activity aiming to the development and implementation of non-destructive monitoring and quick damage assessment systems based on the integration of ICT and sensor technologies, but also its connection with the development and implementation of data correlation, fusion and analysis methods for structural health monitoring.
In fact, under standard operating conditions, such systems aims at providing stakeholders with periodic information on the structural health status of the transport infrastructure. In crisis situation, the overall aim is to provide emergency and disasters stakeholders with high situation awareness by means of real time and detailed information and images of the infrastructure status.
Therefore, the session will be concerned with several main aspects relative to the integrated and non invasive monitoring of the infrastructure as:
a) State of art and novel instrumentation, sensing techniques, as well as data processing approaches to perform high resolution diagnostics and monitoring of civil engineering structures. In particular, several sensing technologies of interest are (but not only) : accelerometers, seismic noise analyzers, optic fiber sensors, Synthetic Aperture Radar satellite platform based, hyperspectral spectroscopy, Infrared thermography, Ground Penetrating Radar, low-frequency geophysical techniques, Ground based systems for displacement monitoring, sonic and ultrasonic sensors, capacitive tomography,…
b) Sensor cross validation, synergy and data fusion and correlation schemes that are crucial for the set-up of a multi-method, multi-resolution and multi-scale detection and monitoring of surface and subsurface changes of the infrastructure.
c) Integration of sensing technologies with new ICT information and telecommunications systems enables remotely controlled monitoring and surveillance and real time data imaging of the critical infrastructures.
d) Numerical simulations of infrastructure behavior under sudden events or other standard external solicitation and connection with sensing techniques measurements.