Harmonised Transport Infrastructure Monitoring in Europe for Optimal Maintenance and Safety

Harmonised Transport Infrastructure Monitoring in Europe for Optimal Maintenance and Safety

Transport infrastructure is highly important on the EU Strategic Agenda. This infrastructure is facing real challenges due to ageing, rapid growth of traffic loads, and natural and man-made resilience threats. Safety risks have become critical in the recent years and manifested in major disasters caused a.o. by structural failures due to maintenance deficiencies. Optimal maintenance is only possible with the right policies and decisions enabled by timely and accurate information from monitoring. Unfortunately, monitoring is not adequately addressed in the existing standards (CEN TC/250 Eurocodes) and there are gaps in the monitoring practices at national level. Therefore, IM-SAFE aims to support the European Commission and the European Committee for Standardization (CEN) to prepare a new standard in monitoring for optimal maintenance and safety of transport infrastructure based on a comprehensive insight into the trends, challenges, best practices, and technology developments, including the integration of digital innovations. As the effectiveness of the new standard depends on societal acceptance, IM-SAFE simultaneously aims to coordinate and enable public authorities and industries to contribute to standardisation, roll-out, and implementation. The key targeted results from IM-SAFE are: 1) formulation of an EC mandate to CEN; 2) consolidated technical background materials for CEN; and 3) active engagement of stakeholders and experts in the Community of Practice (CoP) and Standardisation Advisory Group (SAG). The IM-SAFE consortium represents a European network of standardisation experts from research and higher educational institutes, large industries, SMEs, and a non-profit platform working on the transport infrastructure along the EU TEN-T and regional corridors. The consortium collaborates with leading infrastructure asset owners and operators as well as monitoring and maintenance companies. These stakeholders and the consortium together have initiated IM-SAFE.