JRC MITICA Workshop

The existing European urban and infrastructural network is prone to ageing and subject to natural events (e.g., climate change) and hazards (e.g., earthquakes), necessitating immediate actions for its maintenance and safety. Within this context, the structural health monitoring (SHM) framework offers a quantitative assessment of the structural integrity, serviceability, and performance, facilitating better-informed decisions for the management of the existing infrastructure.

In this framework, the European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC) established the exploratory research project MITICA (Monitoring Transport Infrastructures with Connected and Automated vehicles) to investigate the opportunities of novel methods of infrastructures motoring for the efficient maintenance of the European aging road infrastructure. MITICA addressed the future advantages of connected vehicles and the measurements from vehicles on-board sensors to infer bridges conditions possibly offering an alternative low cost method of structural assessment. The present workshop comes as a conclusion to the MITICA project that was carried out in the period 2020-2022.

Considering the EU priority “A Europe fit for the digital age”, this workshop aims to showcase recent technological advances and developments in SHM and their application to civil infrastructure. Special focus is given to innovative indirect structural health monitoring (iSHM) approaches that rely on the vehicle-bridge interaction and the deployment of sensor-equipped vehicles for the monitoring of the existing bridge infrastructure, including results from the MITICA Project. The pros and cons of iSHM methods will be compared against direct SHM approaches with a special emphasis on the challenges and lessons learned from real-life SHM implementations. Further, this workshop aims to present the relevant European research and discuss the current state towards the SHM integration in technical standards at a European level.