Digital strategies and technologies in the management of existing railway tunnels

Abstract

The knowledge, the preservation and the maintenance of existing infrastructures are some of the most challenging matters facing modern civilization. It is fundamental to carry out digital strategies and technologies to know and predict the conditions of existing structures. The paper focuses on Italian railway tunnels. Italy is one of the countries with the highest and oldest number of tunnels in the world. ETS introduced a new method for the diagnostic of existing tunnels through an innovative multi-dimensional survey system (ARCHITA) and a new approach for the Management and Identification of the Risk for Existing Tunnels (MIRET). The approach is very fast and minimally invasive. The integrated instrumentation within ARCHITA allows to have almost all the information necessary for the geometrization and diagnostics of a structure with non-destructive tests, preserving the integrity of the structures in the preliminary assessment phase. A new tunnel modelling and design solution, Open-Tunnel, is used to model and analyze the existing tunnels, aiming to create digital twins of the real structures. The defects results and analysis are digitalized and manipulated in a specific IT environment by ETS. Different case studies are presented throughout the paper.