On the 23rd of May, 2023, the ASHVIN project hosted its second technical webinar presenting its innovation and results in deploying digital twin tools for the maintenance of civil engineering assets during their entire life cycle. This topic attracted much attention from our stakeholders’ community, as over 130 participants registered, and 86 persons participated (at the highest participation peak) in this webinar.

The presentation showcased what the ASHVIN solution offers for maintaining different infrastructure types. The speakers were: 

• Rahul Tomar, CEO of Digital Twin Technology, Germany. Technical coordinator of ASHVIN.
• Irina Stipanovic, Managing Director, Infraplan Consulting, Croatia. Research task leader and demo site leader at the Airport infrastructure in Zadar. 
• Ilias Koulalis, Senior Researcher at CERTH-ITI M4D, Greece. WP Research leader in ASHVIN.
• Rolando Chacon, Associate Professor, Polytechnic University of Catalonia, Spain. WP Research leader & demo site leader at bridges for high-speed railways in Extremadura and bridges for highway network in Barcelona.

Mona Marill, the Communication & Dissemination Leader in ASHVIN, conducted the hosting and moderation.

The webinar agenda can be found online in our Zenodo Library.

Rahul Tomar, the ASHVIN partner from Digital Twin Technology, opened the session by presenting the ASHVIN projects and explaining what the ASHVIN system is about and how its digital twin tools can support the maintenance of different civil engineering assets.  In his intervention, Raul underlined the cooperation of 15 partners during 3 years of research to create a digital toolkit for 3 stages design, construction and monitoring; the session’s core topic was on the last.

After the introduction, Rolando Chacon, a partner from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, explained how the ASHVIN’s digital twin toolkit supports the assessment, planning and decision-making processes in the maintenance of assets. He described the three tools, RISA, GISI and MATCHFEM, that support these activities. Rolando Chacon emphasised that at ASHVIN, we have been working on safe, efficient, productive maintenance plans for designers, operation managers and infrastructure managers. Our digital tools for data-informed maintenance are based on simulations and predictions in different domains, risk assessments with different KPIs and stakeholders and spatial integration at different scales.

Then the speakers proposed a deep dive into the ASHVIN demo cases presenting how the created technologies have been deployed in real-life environments across 10 different European demo sites. This webinar focused on presenting three demonstration sites:

• Airport infrastructure in Zadar, Croatia
• Bridges for High-Speed Railways in Extremadura, Spain
• Bridges for Highway network in Barcelona, Spain

Irina Stipanovic, an ASHVIN partner from Infraplan Consulting, showcased how the ASHVIN toolkit can support airport infrastructure management, notably in managing safety hazards in runway management. Ilias Koulalis, the partner for ITI CERTH,  explained further how the damage detection models were developed and deployed at the site.  Then Irina Stipanovic provided an overview of the deployed research methodology and conclusions from the demo site.

Rolando Chacon, continued by presenting the two demo cases that he is leading, related to the maintenance of bridges. Firstly, the use case of bridges for high-speed railways and secondly, the use case of bridges for highway networks, which processes include a  routine load test, setting of simulations to predict the response of the assets, measuring, comparing, assessing and reporting to give birth to the digital representation.

The session was closed with a Q&A session where participants asked questions about the accuracy of asset measurements and the BIM data.

With 130+ pre-registered to the webinar and 86 participants during the session, this webinar successfully disseminated the ASHVIN research results and engaged with its stakeholders.

Watch the webinar recording on Youtube and subscribe to our Youtube channel!

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