Digitalisation as enabling technology

The Joint Research Centre (JRC) has very recently published a report on digitalisation in a number of key EU sectors, including construction. This JRC report highlights the lack of integration of digitalisation and data platform in technical standardisation in civil infrastructure. At present and in the future, the main issue is: how to collect and exploit meaningful data throughout the lifecycle of the infrastructure assets that allow both human experts and machines (computers) to make accurate diagnostics, predictions and decisions. 

Therefore, the project objectives of activities in the area of digitalisation are:

  • To set the general requirements and pre-conditions for high-quality and cost-effective acquisition, transmission, storage and processing of monitoring datasets to ensure the data is fully accessible and machine-interpretable.
  • To address the relation between the future standards in monitoring with the open IT standards that are already known or in use in construction, especially on the interoperability of Internet of Things (IoT), Building Information Model (BIM), Geographical Information System (GIS), and Semantic Linked Data (LD).
  • To propose a common design of IT platforms to be developed and deployed to manage monitoring and asset management data of transport infrastructure.
  • To identify how data analytics technologies, including AI, can best be applied to monitoring and asset management of transport infrastructure, and to assess the added value of data-driven approach next to physics-based modelling.