OBSERVATION

Optimization of Seismic Structural Health Monitoring Systems Based on Value of Information Analysis

Infrastructures such as bridges are one of the most crucial and integral parts of civilization and substantially affect a nation’s economic, social, and strategic solidity. Ensuring their safe operation is of utmost importance, given their crucial role in promoting societal welfare and fostering sustainable development. While several engineering fields have progressed in the past few years in leaps and bounds, the management of aging and deteriorating infrastructure is still based on decades-old practices. ObSerVation is aimed at developing a decision support tool (DST) for the design of monitoring systems for the integrity management of bridges and bridge networks in seismic-prone areas. The DST will be based on the Value of Information (VoI) theory and will exploit information about the capacity of the structure gained through Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) data and information about the seismic demand acquired through strong ground motion recordings and state-of-the-art ground motion simulations. ObSerVation will advance the state of the art by incorporating advanced ground motion models along with sophisticated deterioration models that account for the continuous nature of both gradual and sudden deterioration processes in the integrity management framework based on the VoI Analysis.