Andrea Maroni

I received my bachelor’s degree in Building Engineering from the University of Bologna, Italy in July 2011. I moved to Trento where I earned my master’s degree (first class honour) in Civil Engineering at the University of Trento in October 2015.

After completing my Master's degree, I started a Ph.D. degree in Civil Engineering in April 2016 at the University of Strathclyde. My research, supervised by professor Daniele Zonta (lead supervisor) and Dr. John Douglas, is addressed to the multi-hazard assessment and early warning for civil infrastructure, but I am currently focused on the problem of scour at bridge foundations.  

The Ph.D. was suspended from November 2017 because I was employed as a research assistant for a 12-month project on bridge scour (Early warning decision support system for the management of underwater scour risk for road and railway bridges). It was founded by the NERC Environmental Risk to Infrastructure Innovation Programme (Grant no. NE/R009090/1). Transport Scotland, Network Rail, Arup, Heriot-Watt University, and SEPA are partners involved in the project.

The project aims at developing a Decision Support System (DSS) for scour risk management for road and railway bridges. The system will estimate and update the present and future failure risk using real-time information from monitoring of scour depth, rainfall forecast, and river flow characteristics.

Using a probabilistic approach, scour depth at every bridge locations of an infrastructure network will be estimated by monitoring limited and critical bridges. Roughly speaking, observation from a scour monitoring system installed at a pier of one bridge is used by the probabilistic tool (i.e., the Bayesian Network) to provide a better estimate of the scour depth at unmonitored bridges. 

The scour risk rating methods used by Transport Scotland, and Network Rail are then reproduced in a probabilistic form. Finally, the optimal decision to take (do nothing, send inspectors or close the bridge) is found through a Decision model.

A scour monitoring system will be installed on a bridge in south-west Scotland (A76 200 bridge over River Nith in New Cumnock) to demonstrate the functioning of the DSS, and I am currently testing it in the Geomechanics laboratory.

My research interests are structural health monitoring, scour risk assessment, Bayesian inference, Bayesian Networks, bridge vulnerability assessment, earthquake risk assessment, post-earthquake damage building assessment, signal processing, and data analysis. 

I am involved in tutoring in an undergraduate and master course ("CL435 Prestressed Concrete, Steel-concrete Composite and Structural Stability" run by professor Zonta) and supervising undergraduate students in their dissertation project.