BMS-INSAR: GIS PLUGIN FOR BRIDGE PORTFOLIO SERVICE DISPLACEMENT ANALYSIS THROUGH MTINSAR DATA

This paper presents a qGIS plugin named Bridge Management System – Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (BMS-InSAR), developed in Python language, to automatically appraise service deformations in simply supported concrete girder bridges. Bridges monitoring, maintenance and retrofit are key goals for transportation management authorities and public institutions. Although traditional Structural Health Monitoring techniques (i.e., on site measurements) are effective and well-established in the current practice, for the purpose of bridge portfolio assessment they are hardly employable. Thus, new practices and technologies are needed to overcome these limitations and to provide new monitoring systems at disposition of transportation management companies. In this framework, the paper proposes a tool based on data provided by satellite imagery (i.e., MTInSAR) and that exploits additional information about structural knowledge. Namely, BMS-InSAR is constituted by a predisposed client service in which store the above data. After, the tool can automatically process available data and provide a graphical output, which can be adopted as a decision support system by users. Given the correlation between Line-of-Sight displacements and structural typology, the tool is developed for the most widespread structural typology of bridges in Italy, namely single/multi-span simply supported concrete girder bridges. The proposed system is described by pointing out the features about the design of its components and is tested on a case study.