Scheduled Special Sessions

Yiska Goldfeld (Technion – Israel Institute of Technology), Filippo Ubertini (Universita degli di Perugia): The new era of civil structural and infrastructural systems is set to revolutionize the construction industry by combining cutting-edge high-performance materials and smart structural health monitoring (SHM) systems. This novel approach involves a paradigm shift from separate systems to a single, multifunctional physical element, seamlessly integrating the structural system, functional components, and health monitoring capabilities.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has revolutionized the field of Structural Health Monitoring in various ways. This special session organised by Enrique García-Macías (University of Granada), Ayan Sadhu (Western University) and Ilaria Venanzi (University of Perugia) invites contributions focusing on innovative uses of AI techniques for SHM for structures and infrastructures.

This Session Special organised by Francesca Marsili (Helmut Schmidt Universität) and Filippo Landi (University of Pisa) provides an overview of recent advances in Bayesian updating algorithms and their application to SHM for parameter identification and damage detection.

Based on the experience and track record of Dr. David Garcia Cava (University of Edinburgh) and Dr. David Avendano Valencia (University of South Denmarkt), they have been contributing to the field of understanding the consequences of environmental and operational variabilities in structural health monitoring. In 2022, they wrote a chapter entitled “On explicit and implicit procedures to mitigate environmental and operational variabilities in data-driven structural health monitoring” within the book “Structural health monitoring based on data science techniques”. This work has helped them to gather the state-of-the-art in the matter. For this reason, they propose this session.

This special session organised by Abdollah Malekjafarian (University College Dublin), Eugene OBrien (University College Dublin), Chul-Woo Kim (Kyoto University), Hae Young Yang (Stanford University) aims to bring together academic scientists and industry leaders to present their recent advances in the field of indirect structural health monitoring of civil infrastructure. It covers a broad research area from simple models to applications, numerical modelling, laboratory-scale experimental case studies and field tests.

This special session organised by Abdollah Malekjafarian (University College Dublin), Vikram Pakrashi (University College Dublin), Eleni Chatzi (ETH Zürich) invites contributions reporting on SHM techniques and algorithms, which beyond reporting improvements on the individual unit level (wind turbine) offer insights into the benefits harnessed at the farm level.

The Keywords for this Special Sessions of Said Quqa (University of Bologna), Pier Francesco Giordano (Politecnico di Milano) and Ekin Ozer (University College Dublin) are large-scale monitoring, indirect monitoring, population-based monitoring, satellite applications, smartphone-based monitoring, structural health monitoring, data-driven decision-making, data fusion, machine learning.

This special session of Alice Cicirello (University of Cambridge), Elizabeth Cross (University of Sheffield), Eleni Chatzi (ETH Zürich) invites contributions on methodological techniques and industrial applications showcasing recent advances in incorporating physics in ML strategies.

Despite intriguing features and promising breakthrough in several fields of application, many SHM systems have so far not achieved widespread industrial acceptance as a continuous monitoring technique. It is indeed of paramount importance understanding the potential effectiveness of an SHM system before transfer into routine applications. A key aspect is that there is still a lack of strategies for performance assessment that take into account the peculiarities of SHM systems. To assess the ability thereof, a variety of prerequisites and contributing factors have to be considered and need to be analysed in the way they affect the system reliability.

This session organised by Giorgia Giardina (Delft University of Technology) and Pietro Milillo (University of Houston, DLR) aims to discuss the most recent challenges and development in InSAR applications to the health monitoring of structures. Topics cover and are not limited to advances in the processing algorithms and application case studies, including tunnels, bridges, dams, pipelines, etc.

Dr. ir. Richard Loendersloot (University of Twente) and Dr. Nan Yue (Delft University of Technology) propose a special session on the topic of impact identification on (complex) composite structures, beyond the level of detection and localization, more focusing on force/energy reconstruction, utilization of SHM diagnosis in maintenance decision making and digitization of life cycle management.

The SPP "Hundred plus" (SPP 100+) program's overarching objective is the conceptual and fundamental realignment of the current maintenance strategy for infrastructure structures. Within this Special Session, organised by Steffen Marx (Technische Universität Dresden), Chongjie Kang (Technische Universität Dresden), different members of the program will present activities performed within the SPP 100+ program, allowing an overview of the program to be provided.