FORESEE Workshop on “Road and Railway networks’ resilience strengthening through satellite monitoring”

19 September 2019 | London, UK

On 17th of September, the FORESEE Stakeholders Reference Group organised the first workshop at Telespazio in London under the tittle “Road and Railway networks’ resilience strengthening through satellite monitoring”.

Linear infrastructures and assets studied in isolation give an incomplete view of resilience for transport assets. Only when asset condition analysis is integrated with its environment, the full dynamics of the infrastructure come to life providing improvements for infrastructure resilience assessment. However, improvements can be achieved by using satellite technologies at regional scale with GIS based environmental assessments and at asset scale with Satellite Structural Health Monitoring (S-SHMTM).

Discussions leaded by Chairman Engineer Jesús Rodríguez animated the participation of several stakeholders from the road and railways sectors covering three main topics:

-The global impact of almost 20 years of satellite derived monitoring data in the transport sector;

-FORESEE developments in satellite monitoring solutions and other latest developments addressing the needs and requests of end users being civil engineers, clients, contractors and surveyors to contribute towards the digital transformation of the industry to provide a continuous, dynamic and efficient monitoring system;

-Challenges faced when designing and implementing tools for resilient transport infrastructure, being considered in the Resilience Shift initiative.

The workshop displayed various practical cases. Experts could witness how innovation in form of satellite technologies can complement current transport management schemes to improve resilience in key engineering assets.

Discussions provided good inputs for the FORESEE project which is currently developing a new management tool able to provide effective and quick solutions for transport infrastructure operators and authorities in case of disasters caused by humans or nature. The project will deploy the methodology in six real scenarios covering critical railways and road assets (i.e. bridge 25 April in Lisbon, M30 ring in Madrid, high speed railways in Germany, motorways in seismic areas in Italy, etc).

For further information about FORESEE, visit the website: https://foreseeproject.eu/