Standardisation and adoption strategies

Infrastructure asset management and structural monitoring are currently subjected to national regulations, but the development of European transport corridors makes explicit the necessity of European standards that define common general approaches, leading ultimately to the achievement of comparable safety levels in the EU Member States. The introduction of new European Standards will also facilitate the integration of digital solutions into asset management systems currently adopted by infrastructure owners and operators allowing them to benefit from the newest technological innovations. 

The project activities directly contributing to this purpose, in particular:

  • To identify the gaps in the actual national and European guidelines and standards with respect to inspections, monitoring and testing aiming at data-informed diagnostics of structures, evaluation of the actual and future structural safety and optimisation of risk-based and condition-based maintenance strategies.
  • To collect the technical input for EU standards for inspection, monitoring and testing, safety assessment, pro-active maintenance of bridges, tunnels and other relevant transport infrastructures.
  • To prepare the mandate for CEN that comprises 1) new standard on structural monitoring; 2) new standard for condition-based and risk-based maintenance of transport infrastructures; and 3) further amendment to the existing EU standards on safety assessment taking into account inspections, monitoring and testing.
  • To propose a plan of approach for the execution of the mandate by CEN.
  • To involve European and international experts in the IM-SAFE Standardisation Advisory Group (SAG) to provide reviews of the draft input for the EC and CEN, and to support the CEN working groups.
  • To anticipate the implications of the new standards for public and industrial stakeholders in Europe, and to generate an adoption plan and a change management strategies to secure a smooth transition from the current practice, supported by a plan for pilot cases of the future standards.
  • To address and harmonise standardisation efforts by relevant European and international standardisation organisations in the disciplines of structural engineering and ICT, especially the open standardisation of Building Information Model (BIM) for civil/transport infrastructure, Semantic Linked Data for Europe’s road asset management aligned with the policy of CEDR, and Internet of Things (IoT) in relation with sensing and data acquisition systems for monitoring of transport infrastructure.