CAMELOT was born as a natural development of the experience of the Earthquake Engineering & Dynamics laboratory (EED lab) of the Politecnico di Torino, gained in over two decades of solving complex structural engineering problems. The difficulty in monitoring civil structures mostly derives from the need for a multidisciplinary approach, which is precisely the strength of our group. We were born as a team of earthquake engineers with skills ranging between signal processing and conservation of architectural heritage, and it is thanks to this specificity that we have come to create CAMELOT, an integrated system that allows permanent and periodic monitoring of civil structures and infrastructures.

Civil structures and infrastructure have an average design life of 50-100 years, with appropriate safety margins. Most of the civil constructions in Italy, but also over the world, were built after the second world war, this being especially true for infrastructural assets. This means that nowadays, civil constructions have passed the design life and structural inadequacies are becoming more and more evident, even to non-specialized observers. In addition, earthquakes and extreme events triggered by climate change highlighted an onset of fragility of the built environment, which has not only become more vulnerable due to aging, but also more hazardous as the effects of natural disasters had been underestimated. Then, safety standards are constantly evolving. Standards are moving to regulate monitoring aspects, and in the near future the mandatory adoption of these systems on important civil structures and infrastructures cannot be ruled out. Then, thinking that the built environment is made up of countless high-risk sites for the natural environment, a need for the community to monitor the evolution of the health state of structures over time is evident; in order to reduce the risk of structural catastrophes, and thus safeguard: (i) human lives, (ii) natural environment, and (iii) monetary resources, which can be channelled towards necessary interventions suggested by the monitoring. Despite this, there is a lack of tools capable of satisfying all the needs required in the diagnosis and prognosis phases of a civil structure.

CAMELOT provides an innovative solution for monitoring the structural health of buildings and large civil structures/infrastructures. It can support engineers and practitioners and accompany them throughout the whole decision making process, from instrumental examinations (e.g., sensing system design) to diagnosis (data processing and interpretation), up to prognosis (residual life evaluation).

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 only 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 three 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 analysed 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 by specialized technicians in the sector, and not resorting to interactive optimization processes between technical judgement, monitored structure and virtualizations of the same, which would maximize the amount of information that can be extracted from the structure for the subsequent diagnosis phase, and at the same time would reduce the huge ammount of unuseful data (solving the important issue of data storage).

CAMELOT solves these problems by relying in three main services and one product. The supplied product is a software that can tell if a specific monitored structure/infrastructure is healthy or if it is experiencing anomalous conditions. This is done using advanced Machine Learning (ML) techniques on data acquired from the monitored system. Coming to the first service, it consists in an intelligent (optimized) design of the experimental setup to be used for acquiring information for the structural health assessment. The second services focuses on anomaly detection, starting from data aquired by the structural sensing system installed on the strutture. Finally, the third service, on the other hand, offers advanced support that passes through the realization of a Digital Twin (DT), based on physical laws, of the structure being monitored. Thanks to the use of the digital twin, it is possible to investigate in more detail the causes of the pathology that is affecting the structure, and to design any structural interventions.