Monitoring Transport Infrastructures with Connected and Automated vehicles

Recent infrastructure assessment operations in Europe confirm that the EU transportation infrastructure (bridges, roads, railways) is ageing. Currently, 30-40% of the existing bridge stock presents deficiencies: which isn’t strange considering that 45% of the entire EU motorway network was built before 2001, while 35% of the EU railway bridges are over 100 years old.
As the ageing EU infrastructure is at a late stage of its lifecycle,  investments in maintenance and retrofitting are warranted to ensure serviceability and safety. As such, technological advances linked to structural monitoring and data processing are needed and innovative approaches to assess the quantitative condition of existing infrastructures are being developed.
Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) systems can monitor the infrastructure integrity in real-time, detecting potential damage and facilitating better-informed decisions. For instance, civil infrastructure owners, local authorities, national agencies, and governments can get insights on the need to refurbish and repair, retrofit, upgrade, or replace existing infrastructures.
Nonetheless, the extensive use of SHM strategies to the large EU bridge stock is still limited by the available resources and implementing them in existing structures is often challenging. Mobile-first, fast and economical solutions are needed and that’s why June’s workshop aimed to showcase recent technological advances and developments in structural health monitoring and how they can be applied to civil infrastructure. 
During the workshop, a special focus was given to innovative indirect structural health monitoring approaches. These rely on vehicle-bridge interactions and on the deployment of sensor-equipped vehicles to monitor existing bridge infrastructure: including results from the JRC MITICA Project.
 Inspired by technological developments on connected mobility, this project aimed to contribute to the EU priority “A Europe fit for the digital age” by exploring synergies between connected vehicles and smart infrastructure components.
The synergies mentioned above can exploit the dual functionality of a passing vehicle as it both excites the infrastructure and records its response. This offers a monitoring ability at the highest spatial resolution. These advantages were assessed at the JRC Ispra within a full-scale experimental campaign on a bridge-like structure under laboratory-controlled conditions. It is expected that the developed methodology will be equally useful in monitoring existing roads and railways.
The discussions that took place during the workshop highlighted the high interest within the academic and technical communities to developing vehicle assisted iSHM. Attending delegates presented different applications and research, from theoretical and scaled experiments using a single vehicle, to full-scale applications by means of crowd-sensing campaigns). The feasibility of monitoring foot bridges (with bikes) or rail bridges (using passing trains) was also discussed. 
What emerged from the discussions is that significant groundwork has been carried out, and it is expected that future research will focus on the accuracy of monitoring findings and data collection and use. It is also estimated that the insertion of the bridge-like structure developed for MITICA in the latest call for expressions of interest will contribute to further developments on in-vehicle systems for iSHM.

Link: https://trimis.ec.europa.eu/sites/default/files/documents/jrc122485_mitica_leaflet_final_0.pdf