Sustainability and resilience have become mainstream goals of political agendas globally, contrasting the causes of climate change and mitigating its effects, respectively. Built environment issues, infrastructure maintenance and rehabilitation, urbanisation and environmental impact are pushing for broader-scale goals, like climate change assessment and natural disaster prediction and management. In this context, Non-destructive testing (NDT) and Earth Observation (EO) methods lend themselves to be instrumental at developing new monitoring and maintenance approaches.
Despite the technological maturity reached by NDT and EO, important research gaps on standalone technologies and their integration are still unexplored. One challenging issue is the development of monitoring systems based on the integration of sensing technologies with advanced modelling, ICT and position/navigation topics up to IOT and the new concept of citizen engineer. The goal is to provide stakeholders with handy and user-friendly information to support maintenance and controlling major risks.
This Session primarily aims at disseminating contributions from state-of-the-art NDT and EO methods, promoting stand-alone technology and their integration for the development of new investigation/monitoring methods, applications, theoretical and numerical algorithms, and prototypes for sustainable and resilient infrastructure and built environments.
The followings are areas of interest and priority for this Session:
- sensor types, systems and working modes (acoustic/electric/electromagnetic/nuclear/radiography/thermal/optical/vibration sensors; remote and ground-based, embedded sensing systems; stand-alone and integrated multi-source sensing modes);
- advanced processing methods and information analysis techniques (multi-dimensional signal processing; image processing; data processing and information analysis; inversion approaches, AI);
- multi-sensor, multi-temporal and multi-modal data fusion and integration (image fusion; spatio-temporal data fusion; AI and machine learning for data fusion and integration);
- ICT for spatial data infrastructure, distributed computing and decision support systems;
- citizens as “sensors” for defect detection and data collection;
- new NDT applications and EO missions for downstream implementations;
- NDT and EO for new standards, policies and best practices;
- case studies relevant to built environment diagnostics and monitoring.