The IRRADIA research project for the advanced management of infrastructures

Abstract

AISICO and ‘Sapienza’ University of Rome are working on the project IRRADIA, a research program aiming to investigate the use of Artificial Intelligence for the structural assessment of railway and road infrastructures. The starting point is the BRIGHT method (BRIdGes Health Testing method, patented by AISICO), already applied on a large data set of information, and essentially based on the automatic detection of damages on structural elements of bridges and viaducts. The results carried out on 80 railway bridges provide new ideas to the sector of monitoring and control of existing infrastructures in terms of automatization. Then, the BRIGHT method, built on the railway specifications described by DOMUS, has been recently expanded to meet the requirements of the 2022 Italian Guidelines for existing road bridges and viaducts (DM 204, 1/07/2022). These require to fulfill several defect sheets for each structural element (e.g., beams, transversal beams, slabs, piers, abutments, supports, and so on), with a proper evaluation, for each defect, of type, extension and intensity. It follows that the damage evaluation requires usually a large number of operations with a high level of repetitiveness. Therefore, the use of AI techniques is a promising tool for the near future, to acquire and collect the images with unmanned aerial vehicle, from one hand, and to fulfill the defect sheets, from the other one, reducing time and cost. In this framework, one of the main goals of the cited IRRADIA research project is the investigation of the results obtained with the BRIGHT method extended to 2022 Italian Guidelines, that is, to road infrastructures. In this contribution the first results obtained on two bridges, the first in reinforced concrete and the second with a masonry structure, are presented and discussed.