The demands on the safety and reliability of infrastructure management in the area of sea and inland ports are constantly increasing due to increasingly globalised trade. By creating an intelligent infrastructure, this project aims to solve various challenges in the management of the existing port infrastructure. Digitalisation and the use of AI processes are also subsumed under the term smart infrastructure in this project.
Only the end-to-end digitalised management of port infrastructure enables the economical use of resources, predictive maintenance and early and comprehensive damage detection and assessment. This can lead to considerable cost savings.

The aim of this project is to develop technologies and methods that enable the most dynamic and innovative use of building data in operation, taking into account the existing structures and port personnel. On a scientific and technical level, the focus is therefore on creating innovative methods and processes both in terms of IoT-based measurement technology and AI technologies for the intelligent harbour structure. In this way, high-resolution, high-frequency and comprehensive structural data can be utilised with the help of big data approaches in fully digital and automated processes for the operation of a smart infrastructure.

In this project, the Geodetic Institute of Leibniz Universität Hannover is working on the fusion of physical building modelling and its metrological recording. On the one hand, the boundary value problem, i.e. the geometric form of the FE primitives, is modelled. On the other hand, measurement data is used to model load situations in particular, which depict the reaction of the structures to the influencing variables (e.g. gantry cranes) in order to optimise the parameters of the FE models.

The joint project is funded by the BMDV (Bundesministerium für Digitales und Verkehr) with a total volume of € 2.9 million. It is being carried out by the following partners: Dr Hesse und Partner Ingenieure, WKC Hamburg GmbH, S.K.M Informatik GmbH, Leibniz Universität Hannover - Geodetic Institute, TU Braunschweig - Institute for Geodesy and Photogrammetry as well as the Institute for Flight Guidance and Niedersachsen Ports GmbH & Co. KG.