This strategic report aims to provide an overview on current and future trends, needs, standardised methodologies, challenges and main research lines related to monitoring and maintenance of transport infrastructure. The report includes the Executive summary (Chapter 1) and Infographics (Annex 1) for dissemination at political and public administration level.
Chapter 2 explains the IM-SAFE project context and includes a brief explanation of the needs for research and standardization in Europe, together with a description of the methods and the approach pursued in this report.
In chapter 3 the current status in structural maintenance, safety assessment and monitoring is analysed. Here basis is taken in an intensive dialogue with relevant stakeholders on regional and on Pan-European level. While the detailed report on this dialogues is documented in Appendix A1 and A2, chapter 3 contains the corresponding catalysation and summary of current state of practice, research and development and standardisation. The chapter is concluded with the identification of the stakeholder perspective on the major trends for future developments.
In chapter 4 the accumulated state of current knowledge relevant to structural maintenance, safety assessment and monitoring is aggregated to a concise description of a rational procedure and the main challenges for practical implementation are highlighted.
How current best practices can transition towards more rational risk oriented approaches, how this can be supported by standards and how these standards can be developed is discussion in chapter 5, that also contains direct implications for the further work and developments of the IM-Safe project.
The document concludes with an extensive final section comprising the applicability of the current practices in infrastructure monitoring and maintenance, a summary of the outlook, providing proposals for future actions, and furthermore, complementary insights from best practices across Europe, risk analysis on barriers and lessons learned.