Risk Management of Bridge Portfolios with Remote Sensing Data

The Focus Group “Risk Management of Bridge Portfolios with Remote Sensing Data” involves Hans Fischer Senior Fellow Prof. Maria Pina Limongelli (Politecnico di Milano) and her host Prof. Daniel Straub (TUM School of Engineering and Design, Chair of Engineering Risk Analysis).

The Focus Group explores how remote sensing, specifically InSAR, can support effective and sustainable risk management strategies for bridge networks. Bridge collapses can have severe consequences for public safety, infrastructure functionality, and the economy, while also leading to significant environmental impacts. Managing these risks is increasingly critical, given limited maintenance resources and the growing frequency of natural hazards linked to climate change. While InSAR enables large-scale monitoring by providing spatially extensive deformation data at low cost, its accuracy is limited. To enable systematic use of this data, it is essential to systematically address the uncertainty associated with the measurements.

The Focus Group works on methods to address this challenge through:
• quantification of remote sensing data uncertainty and assessment of its implications for risk evaluation;
• integration of remote sensing with traditional monitoring systems;
• use of innovative approaches to propagate information across bridge portfolios.

Prof. Limongelli holds a TUM-IAS Hans Fischer Senior Fellowship funded by the TUM Georg Nemetschek Institute.