CONSERVE: CONCRETE BRIDGES AND DAMS SERVICE LIFE EXTENSION AND INTERVENTION

Purpose and goal:

The conservation of resource- and emission-intensive infrastructures should be among the major priorities in view of coping with the EU sustainable development goals. As vital constituents of larger asset management systems, special attention must be paid to the abundant number of concrete bridges and dams.

Around six key contributions, the project CONSERVE will develop operational strategies and tools, which enable a user-friendly adoption of complex decisions on life-time extensions and predictive maintenance of concrete bridges and dams. Expected results and effects:

CONSERVE will contribute to a knowledge-based and data-driven infrastructure assessment, by advancing state of the art (SoA) methodologies, tools and technologies and integrating them into an operational framework that facilitates both optimised and user-friendly decision-making on life-time extension of RC/PC concrete structures (bridges and dams) and on sustainable and predictive maintenance. Six specific objectives were defined and associated with 17 measurable expected results to be monitored through tangible and measurable project outputs

Approach and implementation:

The consortium is writing the second stage of the proposal with a detail plan of the activities to be performed and to describe in detail the research challenges and activities identified in the first stage. Some of the research challenges that will be undertaken and explained in the planning project will be the following:Set-up and modelling of the decision problem, Impact and utility modelling, Demonstration of a decision adoption procedure based on the CONSERVE decision tool, Development of the Digital Twin semantic structure and data interoperability framework.