IF articles

Summary - In the field of civil infrastructures, the vast majority of those, built since the middle of the last century, are subject to a global deterioration of mechanical properties due to varied loads and operating conditions compared to the design, to the aggression of atmospheric agents (e.g. freeze-thaw cycles), and sometimes, due to undersized maintenance actions. The availability of new technologies of sampling, extraction, and data analysis are some of the key factors that can automate and streamline maintenance strategies.
Within the era of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) there is a cross fertilization between railway engineering and Information Technology, which requires the utilization of vertically integrated knowledge overtaking the paradigms of the classical engineering. This work is intended to bring to the attention of the reader several theoretical hints of structural and railway engineering, but also of the Industrial Internet of Things, integrating them in order to obtain a unified vision that allows to recognize their complementarity in the specific cases analyzed, allowing to exploit the new IoT technologies to automate and simplify maintenance activities and related complex and time-consuming structural verifications.