Harmonised Transport Infrastructure Monitoring in Europe for Optimal Maintenance and Safety

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - IM-SAFE (Harmonised Transport Infrastructure Monitoring in Europe for Optimal Maintenance and Safety)

Okres sprawozdawczy: 2022-05-01 do 2023-04-30

The increasing dependence of the society on the availability of the European transport networks has driven a political and societal pressure to keep transport infrastructure available, and to provide the required service level at the acceptable costs and without unforeseen investments to maintain the desired performance. The increasing demands with regard to making the build environment more sustainable amplify the expectation that the existing infrastructure will be optimally used, reducing the environmental impact of infrastructure in the life cycle perspective. Transport infrastructure faces major challenges due to ageing, rapid growth of traffic loads, and natural and man-made resilience threats, which all call for an improvement of maintenance practices. The optimal maintenance is only possible with the rational decisions, effectively supported by timely available, meaningful and accurate information. Therefore monitoring of transport infrastructure is expected to become a key enabler of optimal maintenance strategies, ensuring the structural safety of the infrastructure assets, and standardization is perceived as a crucial factor to ensure that the innovations are implemented in an way that meets the actual needs of the European infrastructure.
IM-SAFE aims to support European Commission and the European Committee for Standardization (CEN) in the development of standards enabling implementation of monitoring in context of structural safety and maintenance of the transport infrastructure. The overall objective of such development is to enable transition from corrective maintenance towards risk-based maintenance management & preventive maintenance strategies for transport infrastructure. The key targeted results from IM-SAFE are:
1) formulation of the input for the mandate to CEN regarding amending and extension of CEN standards;
2) consolidation of the technical background materials for CEN and;
3) engaging the stakeholders and experts in the Community of Practice (CoP) across Europe.
As the effectiveness of the new standard depends on societal acceptance, IM-SAFE simultaneously aims to coordinate and enable public authorities and standardisation experts from research and higher educational institutes, large industries, SMEs, and a non-profit platforms to contribute to standardisation, roll-out, and implementation. Therefore consortium collaborates with and disseminates knowledge to the relevant professional networks, leading infrastructure asset owners and operators as well as monitoring and maintenance companies.

IM-SAFE commenced from identifying the existing Political, Economic, Societal and Technological (PEST) barriers to reach a consensus in the development and implementation of new standards, based on research and stakeholders’ input. The insight into the future trends and demands, best practices and regulations, and technology developments, including the integration of digital innovations has been gained in course of comprehensive analysis and the needs and opportunities for standardisation have been elaborated, relevant for:
- smart integration of multi-scale technologies for monitoring of transport infrastructure & damage detection and diagnostics of structures,
- data-informed risk and safety assessment methods and techniques relevant for decision-making on maintenance of infrastructure in context of asset management
- digitalisation of solutions to enable (real-time) data acquisition and data-informed safety assessment
This analysis enabled to formulate a proposal for the scope of standardisation in structural monitoring, data-informed safety assessment and risk-based maintenance management and condition-based maintenance strategies. The scope covers three highly interconnected areas that shall undergo developments related to standardisation:
- principles of diagnostics of structures based on reviewing the structure- or network-specific data gathered from monitoring, which shall be establishing and formulated in a new standard on structural monitoring for transport infrastructure.
- approaches to integrating monitoring and diagnostics with evaluation of the condition of the structures and assessment of the structural performance, which shall be included in further amendment to the existing Eurocodes to enable data-enhanced safety assessment of existing structures,
- condition- and risk-assessment approaches, which shall be introduced in the through-life maintenance and management of the infrastructure and shall be specified in new standard for condition-based and risk-based maintenance of transport infrastructure.
The project findings have been fed into the first draft input for the EC mandate to CEN, which has been discussed with the Standardisation Advisory Board of the project . The policy discussions have been organised with the EC and CEN representatives, to discussed the current project outcomes and the foreseen project impact. The IM-SAFE Community of Practice has been organised, and over 30 contribution to workshops, webinars and public events have been made, directly involving in the discussions over 100 Public Authorities, Industrial and R&D Stakeholders, and over 300 experts in the relevant feeds.

IM-SAFE aims to propose solutions that will enable to embed risk-based maintenance strategies in infrastructure management systems, where the information gathered from the structures will allow for timely and cost-effective decision-making on repairs, strengthening and renovations, which is needed to ensure safety over the infrastructure assets’ lifetime. In the project the required progress beyond the state of the art will be achieved to enable setting the standardized provisions for (i) structural monitoring, (ii) data-informed assessment of the structural condition based on the integration of inspections, monitoring and testing and (iii) optimized decision-making with regard to proactive maintenance of transport infrastructure assets, in which data gathered from monitoring can be used for assessing and predicting the safety and the risk levels of structures, and provide input for an optimal maintenance of the assets.
The intended IM-SAFE project impact is fully aligned with the ambition, foresight studies and policy/discussion papers acknowledged and endorsed by the EU and national governments: change of the current practice achieved by enabling the effective use of monitoring of transport infrastructure will lead to higher reliability and availability and more cost-optimal asset management of the European transport networks. The process of enabling public authorities and supply-chain stakeholders to commit to the development and adoption of the new standards will be aided by ensuring broad societal acceptance from public and industrial stakeholders, achieved by disseminating the best practices and lessons-learned and creating confidence among the stakeholders for the follow-up adoption in real practice.

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IM-SAFE Community of Practice

IM-SAFE overall concept

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - IM-SAFE (Harmonised Transport Infrastructure Monitoring in Europe for Optimal Maintenance and Safety)

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