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Safeguarding Britain's railways

Network Rail owns and operates most of Britain’s railway infrastructure, including 20,000 miles of track and over 29,000 bridges. These bridges need to be carefully maintained, and from time to time, bridges will need to repaired or even replaced, depending on the level of deterioration or damage.

Traditionally, bridge inspections have involved deploying a workforce to visually assess each bridge. Not only does this approach take a lot of time, it also risks the safety of the examiners and leaves room for inconsistency and human error. This can lead to recommendations being made that could ultimately compromise the safety and durability of the bridge infrastructure.

Researchers at NTU are developing digital solutions that can objectively evaluate the condition of bridges, avoiding the risks that come from evaluations made by sight alone.

Professor Song Wu, from the School of Architecture, Design and the Built Environment, has created a new digital tool in collaboration with industrial partners that is capable of visualising intricate datasets and performing virtual examinations. It creates high-definition pictures of the structures and their surroundings in 3D, which can then be measured and analysed accurately using AI enabled imaging technology.

This tool is helping to improve the accuracy of bridge examinations by dealing with issues like data quality and individual subjectivity, and gives a clearer and more definitive picture of a bridge's condition. Another significant advantage to this new technology is it reduces the number of people on site, instead enabling engineers to review and analyse data safely from a remote location.

This research has the potential to transform how the civil engineering sector maintains and ensures the safety of infrastructure assets. By creating digital inspection methods that are objective and which utilise machine learning, it promises to offer more accurate, efficient, safer, and more cost-effective ways to evaluate asset conditions.

Professor Wu’s goal is to enable Network Rail to fully implement the new digital approach and to examine its bridge portfolio using his team’s method. From there, Professor Wu will look to extend the application to other areas, including roads and tunnels.

Professor Song Wu

Professor Wu is an internationally leading researcher in digital construction with more than 20 years’ experience in the UK higher education sector.

Find out more about Song's research

Sustainable Futures

Professor Wu’s research aligns to NTU’s Sustainable Futures research theme.

Find out more about the research theme

Centre of the Built Environment

The Centre of the Built Environment includes researchers from different subject areas within the School of Architecture, Design and the Built Environment, these being Construction Management, Property Management and Development, and Civil Engineering.

Explore the research group in more detail