Our road network is considered one of our vital infrastructures. Therefore, ensuring its availability is a huge priority. Increasing the resilience of road infrastructures and ensuring reliable network availability under unfavourable conditions, such as extreme weather, landslides, and earthquakes is the main goal of the Panoptis project, which has kicked-off recently.
Researchers from the ITC Faculty of Geo-information Science and Earth Observation of the University of Twente team up with colleagues from around Europe in the project, which aims to develop a Decision Support System for increasing the Resilience of Road Infrastructure based on combined use of terrestrial and airborne sensors and advanced modelling tools.
Integrated tool
For that it requires to combine downscaled climate change scenarios (applied to road infrastructures) with simulation tools (structural/geotechnical) and actual data (from existing and novel sensors), so as to provide the operators with an integrated tool able to support more effective management of their infrastructures at planning, maintenance and operation level.
Towards this, PANOPTIS aims to:
- use high resolution modelling data for the determination and the assessment of the climatic risk of the selected transport infrastructures and associated expected damages;
- use existing structural health monitoring (SHM) data (from accelerometers, strain gauges etc.) with new types of sensor-generated data (computer vision) to feed the structural/geotechnical simulator;
- utilize tailored weather forecasts (combining seamlessly all available data sources) for specific hot-spots, providing early warnings with corresponding impact assessment in real time;
- develop improved multi-temporal, multi-sensor UAV- and satellite-based observations with robust spectral analysis, computer vision and machine learning-based damage diagnostic for diverse transport infrastructures;
- design and implement a Holistic Resilience Assessment Platform (HRAP) environment as an innovative planning tool that will permit a quantitative resilience assessment through an end-to-end simulation environment, running "what-if" impact/risk/resilience assessment scenarios. The effects of adaptation measures can be investigated by changing the hazard, exposure and vulnerability input parameters;
- design and implement a Common Operational Picture, including an enhanced visualisation interface and an Incident Management System.
The PANOPTIS integrated platform (and its sub-modules) will be validated in two real case studies in Spain and in Greece.
Role of ITC researchers
Within the project the University of Twente researchers are responsible for the development of a conceptual framework for routine open road corridor monitoring using vehicle- and drone-based sensors, coupled with satellite observation, as well as a multi-sensor synoptic damage assessment for different disaster scenarios, with focus on novel hybrid UAV solutions, and use of advanced image analysis with machine learning. Also, the researchers will be linking degradation and damage information into a dynamic hazard and resilience assessment.
Consortium
The three-year project is in hands of a consortium of 13 partners, led by Airbus. The other partners are National Technical University of Athens (Greece), ACCIONA Construcción S.A. (Spain), Egnatia Odos AE (Greece), Future INTelligence (UK), University of Twente (Netherlands), IFSSTAR (France), Finnish Meteorological Institute (Finland), Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece), Sofistik Hellas S.A. (Greece). C4Controls Ltd (UK), Hydrometeorological Innovative Solutions (Spain), Confederation of Organisation in Road Transport Enforcement (Belgium). The project is financed through the Mobility for Growth programme within Horizon2020.
For more information on the project: http://www.panoptis.eu/
