Predictive Maintenance in Civil Engineering

Time‑series deformation trends can help estimate where assets are drifting away from expected behaviour and where risk is increasing. This supports proactive planning—prioritising inspections and maintenance where it’s most needed—rather than relying only on periodic visual checks.

InSAR can add value across the lifecycle: establishing historical baselines during site selection, tracking settlement and impacts during development, and monitoring long‑term behaviour during operations. The key is defining the decision you need to support and tailoring interpretation accordingly.

Traditional methods can be precise but are often sparse and resource-intensive at scale. InSAR provides wide-area, repeatable coverage and can complement ground methods by adding context and helping target where detailed instrumentation or inspection is most valuable.

InSAR compares radar phase information from repeated satellite passes to measure tiny changes in distance between the satellite and reflective points on the ground or structure. Over many observations, this produces time-series that can reveal millimetre-scale motion trends. However, ‘detectable’ doesn’t automatically mean ‘actionable’. The measurement must be interpreted in context—structure type, viewing geometry, coherence, and uncertainty. Decision-grade monitoring includes quality controls and expert review so the signal is understood before it is used to drive maintenance or safety decisions.

Ageing infrastructure often fails through gradual change: settlement, fatigue, thermal cycles, or changing ground conditions. Continuous monitoring helps detect trends early, prioritise maintenance, and reduce the likelihood of surprises. It also supports defensible decisions—documenting what changed, when it changed, and how quickly. The risk isn’t only missing a problem; it’s also overreacting to normal behaviour. A good programme combines consistent monitoring with expert interpretation so maintenance effort is directed by risk, not by raw data.

Remote monitoring can cover many assets without installing and maintaining sensors on each one, which is especially useful for dispersed networks or hard-to-access sites. It provides historical context using archive data and offers a consistent measurement approach across regions. Traditional sensors are excellent for local, high-frequency measurements, but they require design, installation, calibration, power, and ongoing upkeep. The best approach is layered: remote monitoring for wide-area screening and trend detection, and targeted sensors where higher-frequency confirmation is needed.

Satellite monitoring is commonly used for assets influenced by ground behaviour and settlement—transport corridors (rail and road), embankments, levees, bridges and approaches, tunnels and portals, industrial sites, and urban areas. It can also support portfolio monitoring where the goal is to prioritise attention across many locations. The critical point is choosing monitoring that matches the decision: what ‘normal’ looks like for that asset, what change matters, and what response is expected when change is observed.

Remote sensing supports proactive maintenance by revealing slow-moving trends—settlement, subsidence, or progressive deformation—before they become visible in inspections or generate incidents. Used well, it helps teams prioritise inspections, focus budgets, and plan interventions based on risk rather than schedule alone. The key is interpretation: trend direction, acceleration, spatial patterns, and uncertainty must be understood so decisions are made on reliable insight, not on isolated movement points.