GPE-ICT

Forecasting rock falls and civil infrastructure monitoring

 

The context

Among the many natural hazards in mountainous regions, rock falls are frequently occurring phenomena characterized by their suddenness and difficulty of prediction. In the last decades such events have threatened human settlements as well as transport routes in alpine valleys, and it is now fairly common to associate rock wall failures with variations in the climatic conditions.
The lack of clearly noticeable forerunners and the devastating impact of catastrophic failures, suggest to focus on suitable monitoring solutions able to cope with such phenomena in order to improve emergency management strategies.
Geological mapping and geotechnical assessment indeed provide essential information about the hazards that may relate to an unstable rock slope. Nevertheless, conventional investigation devices present some drawbacks: firstly, they may allow to assess only few critical points on an entire rock face; secondly, they cannot evaluate subsurface discontinuities within the rock mass, and finally, they generally do not consent to activate alarms timely.

Tecnologies developed for monitoring the rock collapse can be, in principle, effectively utilised for monitoring a civil infrastructure (e.g., by envisaging can bus and MEMS accelerometers, please refer to the following) provided some modifications are taken into account . As such, in the sequel, the focus will be given onto rock falls.

Project objectives

GPE-ICT main objectivies are:

  • Developing an integrated monitoring approach for real time forecasting of rockfalls, intended to serve as a reference for civil protection institutions.
  • Launching technologies swelling add-value and intelligence to obtain new generation emergency control rooms.
  • Developing a robust, hybrid distributed monitoring infrastructure highly reusable in diversified application scenarios with a high resolution in space and time.


According to a multi-disciplinary approach, expertise belonging to several fields, such as geophysics, geology, computer science, electronics, telecommunication and topography, is involved with the main aim of developing an appropriate physical model of the slope and checking its temporal and spatial evolution (see figure 1).

 

Figure 1 - Conceptual scheme of the project

Testbed

Due to complex geological and geomorphologic conditions of real case studies, the choice of a testbed was deemed to be essential for on-site testing of the integrated approach. Hence, a prototypal test site was chosen in the pre-alpine area to evaluate rock fall triggering mechanisms.


Geographical location

The testbed is Mount San Martino (figure 2), a 300-meters high rock wall threatening the city of Lecco (northern Italy). In 1969 an unexpected detachment of 15 thousand m3 of limestone rock, destroyed several houses and caused 7 fatalities.

Figure 2 - Mount San Martino (Lecco, Italy)

During this project clusters of wireless sensors will be placed near the crown of the previous rockfall. These sensors will communicate with the control room of Politecnico di Milano located  2.5 Km far from rockface.

Project activities

The main research activities that compound the project are:

  1. Geological and Geophysical phenomenon analysis
  2. Monitoring data analysis
  3. Real time forecasting method development
  4. New generation emergency control rooms design and realization


For a synthetic presentation of the project

 

Multidisplinary roles diagram

 

Research group

  • Politecnico di Milano (Italy)

    Research Director
    Prof. C. Alippi

    Prof. G. Cugola
    Prof. M. Papini
    Prof. F. Schreiber
    Dr. P. Plebani
    Dr. M. Scaioni
    Prof. A.Spalvieri
    Prof. L. Tanca
    Prof. P. Trucco
    Prof. L.Zanzi
    Ing. D. Arosio
    Ing. L.Bonaventura 
    Dr. R. Camplani
    Ing. M. Fortunato
    Ing. C. Galperti
    Ing.O. Grande
    Ing. L. Longoni
    Ing. M. Marelli
    Dott. O. Mejri
    Dr. M. Roveri
    Ing. L. Sportiello
    Ing. V. Vaccaro

    Dott. G. Mannucci

  • Siemens Italia
    Dott.M. Carosella
    Ing. C. Guenzi
    Ing. C. Guidozzi

  • Ragni di Lecco
    P.i. A. Pirovano
    Dott. D. Bernasconi
    Sig. M. Conti


Press Release

  • Espansione - Dicembre 2008
  • Il Giornale di Lecco - 29 september 2008
  • La Provincia di Lecco - 28 september 2008
  • La Gazzetta di Lecco - 27 september 2008
  • Data Manger Online - 24 september 2008
  • Avvenire - 24 september 2008
  • Corriere della sicurezza - 22 september 2008