Project description
New technology for bridge-safety predictions
The collapse of the Morandi bridge in the Italian city of Genoa in 2018 raised many questions about the safety of Europe’s transportation infrastructure. In fact, the majority of bridges and tunnels in Europe were built more than 40 years ago. The structural health monitoring (SHM) systems currently available provide information related to the actual status of existing infrastructures but they cannot predict damages. The EU-funded PAROST project proposes a solution that permits identification and quantification of damages, as well as prevention options through predictive maintenance schemes. This innovative solution is expected to considerably reduce maintenance costs and increase infrastructure safety.
Objective
Our company (IDVIA) is a Spanish engineering consulting company with more than 9 years of experience in the field of Civil Engineering. During the last three years we have worked to develop PAROST, a solution capable not only of identifying, locating and quantifying damage of road bridges and road tunnels, but also of predicting accurately how such damage will evolve in the future. This characteristic makes PAROST a disruptive innovation compared to the structural health monitoring (SHM) systems that exist in the market that only provide information about the current situation.
Thanks to this prediction capacity, PAROST can avoid catastrophes such as the collapse of the Morandi bridge in Genoa (Italy) on August 14, 2018, which could unfortunately become increasingly common since most of the tunnels and bridges in Europe were built between the 1950s and 1970s. In addition, PAROST will provide to infrastructure managers the needed information to create predictive maintenance plans which will allow them to save up to 62% of their annual maintenance cost. In global figures, PAROST will improve safety while reducing maintenance costs of 507.200 road bridges and 46.904 road tunnels in Europe by 8.452M€/year.
By year 3, we expect to have installed PAROST in 384 civil engineering structures (bridges and tunnels) of the European road network. As a result, revenues for our company will be 20.2 M€ with a net profit of 11.8 M€, and 6 new highly qualified jobs will be created.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
SME-2 - SME instrument phase 2Coordinator
46023 VALENCIA
Spain
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.