Designing better monitoring systems

The management of existing civil infrastructure is challenging due to evolving function requirements, aging and climate change. Civil infrastructure often has hidden reserve capacity because of the conservative approaches used in construction design and practice.

The information collected through sensor measurements has the potential to improve the knowledge of structural behaviour, leading to better decisions on asset management. In this situation, the design of the monitoring system is an important task as it directly affects the information collected. However, this task is usually carried out by engineers using only qualitative rules of thumb and experience, reducing the information gain.

This talk will discuss how quantitative methodologies can improve the design of measurement systems. Several approaches will be presented in order to either maximize the information gain of a sensor configuration or obtain an optimal solution according to multiple conflicting performance criteria.

Additionally, a methodology will be introduced to assess whether monitoring information has the potential to influence asset-manager decisions. Several full-scale bridges will be used as case studies to illustrate the main findings of the speaker’s Ph.D. thesis.

The speaker

Numa Bertola is a Ph.D. researcher of the Cyber Civil Infrastructure project at the Future Cities Laboratory (Singapore-ETH Centre) in Singapore. In 2020, he has defended his thesis named ‘measurement-system design for structural identification’.

Before his work in Singapore, he completed his masters degree in structural engineering in 2016 and his bachelor degree in civil engineering in 2014, both at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. His master thesis focused on fluid mechanics and the research was conducted in 2016 at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia.