Expert Q&A: Protecting national infrastructure assets

The ways in which infrastructure assets including wind turbines and bridges are monitored and maintained are set to be transformed in a ground-breaking project.

Led by Sheffield University and funded with a £7.7m EPSRC Programme Grant, the ROSEHIPS project brings together experts from academia and industry to solve the challenge of safely and economically safeguarding current and future infrastructure. ROSEHIPS (Revolutionising Operational Safety & Economy for High-value Infrastructure using Population-based SHM (Structural Health Monitoring)) runs until 2027 and involves Queen’s University Belfast, the Universities of Cambridge and Exeter.

Meet the experts

Why is ROSEHIPS necessary?

KW: A real challenge to monitoring large infrastructure is the lack of data from these structures, particularly damaged-state data. That said, even when there are data available on a given structure, it is not obvious whether they can be used to inform management i.e. provide decision support on repairs or improvements on another broadly-similar structure.

ROSEHIPS will develop and use a formal mathematical approach for calculating a similarity score between structures.