The specific MOMIT achievements beyond the state of the art are overviewed in the following according to the main technologies/activities that have been performed in the project.
Satellite SAR and optical services. Satellite images have been exploited in order to provide different monitoring services for ground deformation analysis nearby the railway track, civil engineering infrastructure, water extent, soil moisture, vegetation, encroachment detection.
RPAS services: An advance on the state-of-the-art of Large-scale RPAS-based monitoring system has been rached thank to developen innovative RPAS platform.
Data fusion: the main ambition of the proiect has been to develop tools that are tailored to the specific needs of the proposed monitoring solutions. This implied the development of tools to process and analyze the data in a consistent, effective and as automated as possible manner, and also to automatically extract information from the fused datasets.
Value added information: a novel methodology has been implemented for the semiautomatic classification and pre-screening of InSAR data. This information could be used for a preliminary mapping of the expected damage of railway facilities at small scale and for the preliminary damage assessment of railway infrastructures (e.g. bridges). Moreover, RPAS has been used for the recognition and damage assessment of structures during early stages of damage during which the facilities exhibit low-moderate damage (e.g. fissures, settlements, etc.).
The MOMIT project includes a rich set of innovative technical aspects related to the railway infrastructure monitoring that will represent a remarkable improvement with respect to existing and currently used monitoring procedures, which often require manual, cumbersome, not completely safe, time-consuming and costly operations. The improvement concerns the automation of the monitoring tasks, the decrease of their cost, the standardization of the monitoring operations, the increase of the safety of the operations and the increase of accuracy, precision and repeatability of the monitoring.
The aim of the project is that the solutions to be developed will be integrated into the daily operational workflow of infrastructure monitoring and management, to provide an innovative range of products, able to support different types of monitoring tasks. The first straightforward advantage is the improvement of the railway maintenance operations, taking into account needs about the reduction of any operation that can cause a slowdown or interruption of the service. Another advantage is the capability to perform safe maintenance operations. A third advantage is the Life Cycle Cost reduction, thus contributing to achieve a cost efficient and reliable infrastructure.
MOMIT project results strongly impact on the railway infrastructure maintenance process boosting the use of remote sensing data and unmanned technologies to generate new effective solutions in terms of products (value added information) and processes (operational workflows).
