The aim of the invention is to provide an innovative solution for monitoring the structural health of buildings and large civil structures/infrastructures. CAMELOT be helpful to support technicians and non-technicians in “decision making” actions, such as diagnostic tools support doctors. In this case, the patients are large civil structures and infrastructures.

Patent Status

PENDING

Priority Number

102021000028184 (patent and software)

Priority Date

05/11/2021

License

INTERNATIONAL

Market

  • TAM – Monitoring of civil structures/infrastructures in Europe: 29.6B € (estimate)
  • SAM – Monitoring of Motorways/Highways in Italy: 800M € (estimate)
  • SOM – Monitoring of Motorways/Highways in North Italy: 64M € (estimate)

Problem

Nothing is designed to last forever, and this is as true for humans as it is for civil structures/infrastructures. The civil structures built in the early 1900s are approaching the end of their design life. However, unlike humans, structures cannot communicate their problems, which become more and more evident and worst with aging. CAMELOT wants to give voice to the built environment so that it can communicate its problems timely, guaranteeing an optimized management of structural interventions and supporting the “decision making” phases, saving money in the maintenance of large civil structures and infrastructures and reducing the risk of potentially disastrous accidents for humans, which would require a close-to-inestimable cost of intervention after disaster.

To reach this goal, CAMELOT propose 2 services and 1 product. The supplied product is a software that can tell, thanks to advanced Machine Learning techniques, if a specific monitored structure/infrastructure is experiencing pathological conditions. With the first service (patent pending) an intelligent design of the experimental setup is proposed, thanks to which the data that the software will use for the structural health assessment will be acquired. The second service offers advanced support through the realization of a Digital Twin (based on physical laws) of the monitored structure. Thanks to the digital twin it is possible to investigate in more detail the causes of the pathology that is affecting the structure.

Current Technology Limits

Commonly, the Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) of large structures and infrastructures can be carried out following a “time-based” (TB) or “condition-based” (CB) approach. In the first, maintenance is prescribed at regular intervals over time. In the second, it is the condition of the structure or the appearance of suspicious symptoms that determine the need for maintenance. Very often, however, the symptom is recognized when the actions necessary for its treatment are very expensive. As for large bridges, protocols more frequently envisage a TB approach to monitoring and a visual CB approach. This means that monitoring and maintenance activities are approximately prescribed every 3 months, extraordinary inspections every 12 months and more invasive tasks (such as destructive tests on samples extracted from the structure) only when needed. By continuously monitoring a structure, instead, it is possible to extract objective parameters, which, if analyzed and compared over time, can help in the early detection of some problems that neither a TB approach nor a visual CB approach can provide. Furthermore, in cases where the monitoring follows a CB approach guided by objective data, the data usually comes from sensors installed relying on the experience gained by specialized technicians in the sector, and not resorting to interactive optimization processes between technicians, monitored structure and virtualizations of the same that maximize the amount of information that can be extracted from the structure for the subsequent diagnosis phase.

Killer Application

The main applications of CAMELOT are:

  • Optimized design of monitoring systems for large civil structures with a reduced number of sensors, at a reduced cost and without compromising result accuracy.
  • Diagnosis of the overall structural health of large structures.
  • Structural health prognosis of large structures.

Where the term civil structure/infrastructure includes, but is not limited to: Bridges and Viaducts, Oil pipelines and refineries, Dams, Architectural heritage constructions, Buildings, etc. The main focus, however, are Bridges and Viaducts.

Our Technology and Solution

CAMELOT is a solution that consists of 2 services and 1 product that allows the Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) of large structures/infrastructures even with a limited number of resources, adapting to the system to be monitored.

In a hypothetical scenario, the customer can acquire the first service (patent deposited) to create an experimental setup, adapted on the structure, and obtained by optimizing the resources at his disposal (e.g., number of sensors). In this way, data with a high information content will be recorded, reducing the waste of money and computational memory. To succeed in this, CAMELOT rely on an integrated software-hardware system, where a sensor (currently at a prototype level) helps us in the setup optimization phase.

Subsequently the same customer uses the product (a software) to evaluate the structural health of the building or the structure/infrastructure of interest. To reduce the number of false positives and false negatives, the software uses advanced Machine Learning algorithms that recognize and separate the physiological fluctuations present in the recorded data from the pathological ones. If, according to the software, there are pathological conditions, the customer can request the use of the second service with which a digital twin of the monitored structure is created. Through virtual tests on the digital twin, we therefore try to understand in more detail what is the nature of the pathology that is affecting the structure, in order to support subsequent “decision making” phases on maintenance and rehabilitation of the work.

Advantages

  • Machine Learning to reduce false positives and false negatives.
  • More than 25% savings thanks to the optimal sensor placement service.
  • High versatility (easily customizable according to the system to be monitored).
  • Digital Twin for difficult prognosis and diagnosis phases.

Roadmap

Right now (year -4), the development and marketing of CAMELOT requires further actions and investments, including, in chronological order:

  • Definition of a preliminary Business Plan (year -3)
  • Fund search – 150K € (year -2)
  • Blindly testing the technology with users outside the team for optimization of the system proposed by CAMELOT – TRL 5
  • Blindly testing the technology with users outside the team for debugging – TRL 6
  • Fund search – 150K € (year -1)
  • Beta release of the technology (limited functionality) – TRL 7
  • Definition of a definitive and time varying Business Plan
  • Fund search – € 300K (year 0)
  • Release of the stable version of CAMELOT: first 10 units – TRL 8
  • Continuous updating of CAMELOT and R&D – TRL 9
  • Break-even point (year 2)
  • Reaching 400 units (year 5)
Review the Technology
TRL 1
TRL 2
TRL 3
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TRL 5
TRL 6
TRL 7
TRL 8
TRL 9

TRL

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