Critical infrastructure, including energy and transportation networks, is failing all around the globe due to design and construction defects, poor maintenance, structural ageing, prior structural damage, and ever-changing ground conditions. This leads to high vulnerability of structures to natural hazards, including seismic activity (earthquakes, landslides), extreme weather events (storms, floods), and wildfires, as well as operational hazards. According to the United Nations Office of Disaster Risk Reduction, global infrastructure loss is approximately US$ 250 billion in 2024. The cost is much higher with the inclusion of the cascading effects.
Prevention is possible, though, by monitoring structural and operational risks and damages in order to take appropriate and prompt mitigation actions before a catastrophe actually happens. However, conventional assessment methods use high-cost sensing equipment, inefficient analysis methods, and non-continuous, even sporadic, monitoring or audits that have no relevance to the actual structural integrity of critical infrastructure assets. Thus, there is an urgent and important need for widespread, real-time, and continuous monitoring and enhanced vulnerability assessment of critical infrastructure.
Within a broad vision of an early-warning multi-hazard platform for the vulnerability assessment and continuous resilience monitoring of critical infrastructure, we offer a comprehensive hardware/software IoT platform for infrastructure owners and operators to monitor their assets continuously and in real time based on accurate, high-tech, and cost-effective IoT sensors and advanced intelligent data analysis. This provides situational awareness of asset condition, improves risk and damage understanding, and produces early warnings, leading to better disaster prevention, response, and mitigation.
We primarily focus on renewable energy and utility infrastructure, including wind turbines, power transmission/distribution substations, and towers within the electric grid. The energy assets are structurally uniform all around the world, making the solution highly scalable with profound societal and economic impact.
The solution, however, is readily applicable to other critical infrastructure assets, including the telecom base station network, transportation network of roads, tunnels, bridges, and railroads, as well as residential and public buildings, data centers, and industrial facilities.