Standardisation in monitoring is a key enabler for optimal maintenance strategies, strengthening or retrofitting measures for ensuring the safety of the infrastructure. New and harmonized European standard for monitoring, including a standardized digitalisation approach provides for meeting safety and availability demands and improved cost-effectiveness of transport infrastructure. To achieve maximal safety, availability and cost-effectiveness of transport infrastructure, IM-SAFE envisions a paradigm shift from the time-based/corrective maintenance towards risk-based/predictive maintenance through data-informed decision-making enabled by a new and harmonised European standard for monitoring, including a standardised digitalisation approach.
As the effectiveness of the new standard depends on societal acceptance, IM-SAFE simultaneously aims to achieve broad acceptance for new standardisation and to enable public authorities and industries to contribute to standardisation, roll-out, and implementation.
The new standards shall open the way for realising significant added values of monitoring of transport infrastructure for governments, industries, and citizens alike. IM-SAFE envisions that risk-based maintenance strategies will be embedded in infrastructure management systems to ensure safety over the infrastructure assets’ lifetime, while the assessment of the structural condition will be based on the integration of inspections, monitoring and testing.
To enable the transition from corrective/time based maintenance to risk-based maintenance of the transport infrastructure, the integrated technical concept of IM-SAFE is founded on three pillars:
- Smart integration of multi-scale technologies for monitoring the structures, which is substantially more effective compared to the conventional approach that solely relies on inspections.
- Data-informed risk and safety assessment for decision-making on asset management.
- Digitalisation to enable real-time data acquisition and data-informed safety assessment.
IM—SAFE will stimulate and guide the transition towards a harmonised approach for transport infrastructure monitoring in Europe through the development and implementation of new standards. The specific project objectives related to coordinating and accelerating the process of acceptance and adoption of the new standards include a) mobilising, expanding and harmonising activities of Community of Practice (CoP), b) creating broad societal acceptance and smooth transition from the current practice to the new approach as well as c) integrating, analysing and disseminating the best practices and lessons-learned in Europe and worldwide to create confidence among the stakeholders for the follow-up adoption in real practice.