Bridgitise: where Digital Innovation meets bridge Safety and Sustainability
BRIDGITISE (call HORIZON-MSCA-2022-DN-01) is the first Industrial Doctorate within the EU dedicated to advancing cost-effective and sustainable Bridge Integrity Management (BrIM) through the integration of digital technologies. A large number of bridges in Europe have been in operation for more than half a century and exhibit widespread signs of deterioration. Besides, they are often operating under conditions substantially deviating from original design assumptions, also due to accelerated deterioration produced by the effects of climate change. Effective management is essential to keep Europe’s transport infrastructure operating, and get it prepared for future social, economic, and environmental developments. BRIDGITISE will take up these challenges proposing a new paradigm for digital BrIm within the EU. The basic idea underlying the project is that the achievement of excellence in this field requires the deployment of innovative technologies for the management of bridge information and their use as decision-support tools for lifecycle integrity management. To this aim, a network of 16 PhD projects is structured around three main research and training clusters focused on the development and validation of digital technologies to collect bridge information; on Artificial Intelligence and IoT technologies to process and share bridge integrity information, on digital decision support tools to manage bridges across their lifecycle. The development of the BRIGITISE will be achieved through a multidisciplinary international consortium, including 24 academic and industrial partners, that covers the whole digital BrIM value chain including distributed sensors, drones, crowdsensing, satellite radar, digital twins, Internet of things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) as decision support tools. The BRIDGITISE approach will pave the way for the training of new generations of researchers and professionals, able to address the pressing challenges related to bridge efficient maintenance through the digitalization of the integrity management value-chain.
Bridgitise has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under the Grant Agreement no. 101119554.
