Monitoring and response of CFRP prestressed concrete bridge

In Europe, and specially in Italy, there is an impressive amount of historical architectural treasures. They need an effective maintenance strategy that cannot be achieved without a reliable real-time or quasi-real-time knowledge of the structural behaviour. Mechanical properties of ancient masonry are highly uncertain. This makes that every step of the mechanical characterization, from sensing system design and location to model updating, should be robust. Robustness against local property changes and large spatial scattering requires distributed sensing and appropriate data mining and data fusion techniques, allowing to reduce data redundancies and to save only the useful information. This goal is among the main targets of a proposal for an Italian national research project, coordinated by the Authors and involving 9 Italian Universities.