Cities, public asset owners and citizens currently struggle to keep bridges and quay walls, often long passed their (technical) end of service life, in adequate condition and open for traffic. Asset owners are in urgent need of reliable and transparent knowledge and tools to support decisions on maintenance prioritisation and potential lifetime extension. LiveQuay will provide an integrated assessment of the safety and performance of bridges and quay walls by designing a decision support platform that will be interactive and based on values from stakeholders. Within the platform, our unique system will indicate more accurately and faster than currently possible, whether the structure is still safe to operate or approaching failure.
LiveQuay addresses the challenge to provide insights in what the most effective information is that supports decision making for asset owners given the complexity of the different views and values the stakeholders have. For this a co-creation approach is set up involving all stakeholders in the knowledge chain. Furthermore, most historic structures are built up from a variety of materials (masonry, timber, soil), and failure mechanisms for these material combinations are difficult to quantify, highly non-linear and changing over time. Therefore, LiveQuay combines several sources of heterogeneous monitoring data with the complex physics behind the prediction of failure mechanisms and remaining life span of bridges and quay walls. The engine of the platform will be a continuously evolving, probabilistic physics-informed machine learning model, which will significantly increase our understanding of the behaviour of bridges and quay walls over time.
Both challenges combined, the LiveQuay platform will lead to a more realistic estimate of the strengthening / renewal needs and will increase the transparency of decision-making. If existing structures can remain in function longer, investments can be postponed and the impact on cities and people can be reduced significantly.
