LASTING

LIFE-CYCLE ASSESSMENT OF EXISTING BRIDGE STRUCTURES USING MULTISCALE AND MULTISOURCE DATA

LASTING faces the challenge of providing a cost-effective solution to a structural safety problem of bridges in service at regional or national level. This is a problem with a multidisciplinary solution, where structural engineering and geomatics engineering play a fundamental role.

Transportation infrastructures are one of the key indicators of the socioeconomic development of country. Moreover, the well-being of the citizens is directly influenced by the quality and quantity of the transportation infrastructures. In this context, when speaking of transportation infrastructure quality, we refer to their preservation and maintenance state in terms of an efficient usage with utmost security. Indeed, safety is one of the main concerns of the structural design, hence regulations have been developed by experts and public administrations which are focused to design and build structures with the maximum safety level. However, there is no country with regulations or standards for the structural evaluation of in-service infrastructures, hence ignoring the deterioration and the structural modifications that may arise during the life cycle of the infrastructures, as well as the changing conditions since they are designed and built.

It is important to consider the increasing number of extreme events, mainly natural (where climate change plays an important role) but also man-made (accidents, negligence, vandalism, or terrorism), Therefore it is important to promote concrete actions to improve the resilience of transportation infrastructures to these events taking into consideration new meteorological conditions, loading –and usage- conditions, as well as changes on the behavior of the population in order to evaluate whether or not the infrastructures are operating in safety conditions.

The large number of infrastructures available to our transport network, added to the great dispersion of these, makes it necessary to implement new methods on a large scale to assess the state of deterioration and carry out a new re-estimation of life in the service of structures, for this is necessary to propose new methodologies based on satellites and terrestrial remote sensing to monitor the evolution of these infrastructures, thus obtaining the necessary data to be able to carry out decision-making systems based on predictive models. With these decision-making systems it is possible to evaluate on a large scale the state of the infrastructure thus obtaining a more efficient and safer transport network.