Jan 31, 2020
About the Customer
In a true showcase of both our global capabilities and broad industry and technical expertise, Engineering Industries eXcellence’s team has been working with the Italian Navy’s engineering headquarters on an exciting and groundbreaking initiative for Smart Infrastructure focused on the San Francesco di Paola swing bridge of Taranto in Apulia, Italy. To help them optimize the processes by which the performance of the swing bridge was being monitored and maintained, our team built and deployed an innovative bridge monitoring system leveraging Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, real-time data acquisition and advanced analytics.
The Customer’s Challenge
The San Francesco di Paola swing bridge of Taranto in is the most important knot of the town’s entire infrastructural network. Built in 1887 and renewed in 1958, the swing bridge is 295 feet long and 30 feet wide. The bridge allows for the passage of big military ships into the naval dockyard when opened. The importance of this bridge to naval operations has led to the enforcement of a rigorous schedule of physical checks and maintenance interventions which ensure that the bridge will continue to function as expected.
Due to the unique structure and physics of the swing bridge, these frequent interventions are carried out by highly specialized operators and using very expensive equipment. In addition to being costly, the checks drastically interrupt the normal flow of urban traffic on the bridge. As a result, the Italian Navy’s engineering headquarters in Taranto decided to invest in new technologies to facilitate and improve the monitoring, management and maintenance activities for the San Francesco di Paola bridge. Thanks to our company’s expertise designing, implementing and integrating digital solutions for a long list of leading Aerospace, Space, Naval & Defense customers in both the U.S. and Europe, the customer partnered with Engineering for this initiative.
About the Project
The Engineering team first designed and built powerful IoT sensors that were installed on the bridge in order to continuously monitor the structure and collect vibrational data in real time. The sensors were developed to be able to process an amount of data that was far too great and high volume than could ever be collected manually. The IoT system samples bridge vibrations at 200 Hz; that means that the sensors are collecting 4,000 vibration instances every 5 seconds.
As the sensors measure bridge vibrations, they automatically collect and send this information to an integrated platform for real-time data management and analytics. Designed and deployed by our Software Development team, the system is a secure and central repository for all the vibrational data collected, creating a continuously-growing data lake related to the performance of the swing bridge that can be accessed, studied and utilized by the customer now and in the future.
The platform is also able to analyze the vibrational data and use it to deduct information about the stability of the bridge. The vibrational events are consumed as an input by a sophisticated algorithm developed by Lieutenant Fabio Campeggio, Naval and Civil Engineer of the Italian Navy. The algorithm was based on the results from a 6-month pilot using the FEM, or Finite Element Method, a powerful method for computing the displacements, stresses and strains in a structure under a set of loads. If the dynamic response of the bridge changes too greatly over time or moves outside of a specific threshold, the system sends automatic notifications to alert relevant personnel. This information will be used by the customer to optimize maintenance planning and interventions for the swing bridge, saving costs and resources. It will also enable them to identify issues early and close the bridge in order to avoid possible unexpected failures.
Furthermore, the solution uses the data being collected to calculate and provide bridge performance analytics that can be accessed by the Italian Navy engineering headquarters via a web-based application. There, authorized users can see and understand the dynamic responses of the bridge over different time periods. They can run drill-down analyses for Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that the sensors have been configured to extract from vibration signals, including Damping Time, Fourier Transformation, Peak Frequency, Peak Vibration, Velocity, Displacement and Dynamic Response.
The Future of Smart Infrastructure
The dynamic monitoring system is now successfully running on the Taranto bridge, and the customer is analyzing the results of the data being collected by the system. We are very proud of the successful completion and delivery of this innovative solution, which is truly the result of a close collaboration between the Italian Navy, Engineering Industries eXcellence and Engineering Italy teams. The solution delivered is a powerful showcase of the value that enabling technologies and digitalization can bring to infrastructure performance, stability, improvement and disaster prevention. The project was even mentioned in Parliament by the Italian Minister of Defense as an example of innovative initiatives for the modernization of electric control systems and bridge automation in the country. Future developments will include the addition of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and video image analysis capabilities, integrated with the monitoring system to enable advanced pattern recognition and predictive analytics.
Our team is very proud of the successful completion of this project and looks forward to continuing to partner with the customer on future initiatives that will further expand, enhance and augment the capabilities of their new monitoring system. We also strongly believe that this initiative will be a critical use case for the future of Smart Infrastructure, showcasing how and why projects like this must be expanded in order to ensure the stability of bridges, buildings and critical structures not only across Italy, but in the U.S. and around the world.
Customer's Business Drivers
- Fast and flexible platform development
- Enhance reliability of infrastructure
- Optimize bridge maintenance planning and interventions
- Reduce structure maintenance costs
- Enable automatic real-time data collection and monitoring of bridge
- Provide analytics about infrastructure performance
- Build a secure data lake to drive continuous improvement and more informed decisions
- Facilitate and improve the monitoring of structures that are not easily reachable (bridges, trellises, railways, wind turbines, etc.)
