Digitalization of bridge integrity management: the role of SHM

Maria Pina Limongelli

Associate Professor, Politecnico di Milano, Italy

Le 16 octobre 2025 à 13h30, location to be announced

Abstract: 

The digital age is impacting industries across all sectors, including engineering. Digital technologies enable automatization, making information reliable, repeatable, cheaper, and quickly accessible. Many European bridges, dating back to ’50 and ’60 of the last century are now close to, or beyond, the end of their design life. Optimal maintenance actions are required to keep the asset at the desired performance level, minimizing the asset life-cycle costs. Currently, the information flow in the bridge value chain is still based on outdated and underperforming methods such as visual inspections. Digital transformation through disruptive technologies, such as distributed sensors, drones, crowdsensing, satellite radar, digital twins, machine learning, can make available huge amounts of information to support the decision-making processes involved in bridge integrity management over the service lifetime. This talk discusses recent research activities on digital technologies aimed at collecting, processing and modeling information about the structural condition. Specific focus will be on low-cost, large scale approaches and on strategies to accounting for the quality and effectiveness of the information in supporting decisions related to bridge integrity management.

Biography: 

Maria Pina Limongelli holds a PhD in Seismic Engineering from Politecnico di Milano, where she is currently Associate Professor of Structural and Seismic Engineering. Her research focuses on Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) of civil infrastructure, with particular emphasis on vibration-based and remote sensing techniques, value of information analysis, and the standardization of SHM practices.

Dr. Limongelli holds prominent positions in several professional committees and associations in the fields of SHM and structural engineering. She serves as Vice President of both the International Association for Bridge and Structural Engineering (IABSE) and the Society for Civil Structural Health Monitoring (SCSHM), and acts as a reporter for the Joint Committee on Structural Safety (JCSS). She also chairs the Data-Enhanced Infrastructure Management Committee within SCSHM.

She is a member of the editorial boards of several leading international peer-reviewed journals, including Structural Health Monitoring, Journal of Civil Structural Health Monitoring, Engineering Structures, and Bulletin of Earthquake Engineering. Dr. Limongelli coordinates and contributes to numerous national and international research projects focused on SHM, bridge resilience, and the digitalization of bridge integrity management.