Title: Large-Scale Monitoring: Innovative Methods for Cost-Effective and Extensive Data Collection in Civil Infrastructure

Organisers: Said Quqa (University of Bologna), Pier Francesco Giordano (Politecnico di Milano), Ekin Ozer (University College Dublin)

With the escalating travel demand in urbanized areas, the need for reliable tools to monitor the health conditions and functionality of transportation infrastructure becomes crucial. Policymakers are increasingly promoting adopting structural health monitoring (SHM) systems for strategic bridges and viaducts due to their importance in transportation networks. However, from the perspective of damage characterization, the high cost of instrumenting bridges with dense sensing systems remains a challenge. Traditional SHM approaches, relying on direct sensor installations and visual inspections, can be resource-intensive and limited in scope, especially when monitoring vast infrastructural networks. Therefore, decision-makers are seeking efficient and cost-effective solutions to assess the health and functionality of transportation networks, bridges, and other vital infrastructure components.

This special session on large-scale monitoring aims to explore innovative techniques that empower decision-makers to gather data at a large scale or in a cost-effective manner, offering valuable insights into structural integrity and performance.

To address these challenges, the special session highlights the potential of innovative technologies and techniques to collect and process data on transportation networks. The ubiquity of smartphones presents new opportunities for extensive data collection at a large scale, offering real-time insights into structural behavior and performance. For instance, indirect monitoring leverages sensors on designated vehicles or mobile devices to gather data without extensive on-site installations, thus being extremely cost-effective. Satellite-based techniques based on SAR interferometry and population-based approaches are also gaining popularity in this context, enabling data collection and sharing information among different structures in an area of interest.

Despite the potential of these approaches, challenges and limitations persist. Implementation at a large scale requires robust infrastructures for data management and transmission, necessitating advanced technologies and data processing methodologies.

The special session invites researchers and practitioners to share their theoretical advancements, practical applications, and case studies in large-scale monitoring. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Indirect monitoring methods and technologies
• Population-based monitoring strategies
• Satellite-based remote sensing techniques
• Smartphone-based crowdsourcing approaches
• Data fusion for enhanced decision-making
• Machine learning and artificial intelligence applications
• Low-cost sensor technologies for large-scale monitoring
• Challenges and opportunities in large-scale data management

Keywords: large-scale monitoring, indirect monitoring, population-based monitoring, satellite applications, smartphone-based monitoring, structural health monitoring, data-driven decision-making, data fusion, machine learning.