Capítulos de livros

This paper aims to explain why and how innovative technologies are enablers of strategic asset management (SAM) of water supply, wastewater and storm water systems.

Traffic management is gaining increasing importance in solving the major problem of traffic congestion present in many countries. Traditional techniques of RADAR, LIDAR and LASAR to address this problem are no longer an efficient solution, as they are time-consuming and expensive. In this modern age of growing technology and population, challenges are being overcome with several new ways to make the traffic system smarter, more reliable and robust, considering the overall interaction of all the traffic components: vehicles, drivers and pedestrians. These systems are largely supported on Intelligent Traffic System (ITS), and their applications are mostly dedicated to traffic monitoring based on video processing, vehicle detection and tracking. Intelligent surveillance systems may also employ computer vision and pattern recognition techniques. This chapter addresses these new solutions that are being used for traffic management, their advantages and disadvantages, the challenges of their implementation, and most important, the ability to support traffic management systems in their pursuit of solving critical problems of congested transportation networks.

Urban areas are dynamic, complex, and vulnerable systems involving multiple strategic urban services, stakeholders, and citizens. Strategic services essential to society include water and sewerage (water supply, and wastewater and stormwater management), waste management, energy supply, public lighting, transport, and public security. The potential effects of climate dynamics on the urban areas might lead to the aggravation of existing fragile conditions and the emergence of new hazards or risk factors, with major impacts on strategic urban services, people, the natural and built environment, and the economy. Climate change challenges to urban areas thus require an integrated and sustainable approach to increase their resilience, with the allocation of the needed resources at all administrative levels. These include the development and implementation of disaster risk reduction (DRR) strategies, policies, plans, laws, and regulations in all relevant sectors (UNISDR, 2015). This chapter describes a resilience assessment framework to be used by cities and urban-service managers. The framework considers a structured and objective-driven assessment aiming at supporting the development and monitoring of cities

This chapter briefly presents concepts and methodologies to support the management of urban drainage infrastructure. After the introduction, data requirements for assessing the condition of urban drainage systems are presented. Data can be collected in different ways. Data analysis allows for determining structural and functional issues and system performance. The causes and consequences of failures are required for condition assessment and are the subject of the risk section. Any intervention in the urban drainage system has a cost that must be assessed. Mathematical modelling of the urban drainage systems has an advantage for evaluating the hydraulic and structural performance. Decisions on the management of urban drainage rehabilitation need to be addressed considering the different points of view or aspects that are often contradictory. This may be addressed by using multi-criteria decision analysis methodologies.

Testing and monitoring of transport infrastructures are challenging tasks due to the increase in traffic intensity and load. Non-destructive tests are used for pavement diagnosis, most of them at traffic speed, in order to avoid interaction with users. With the development of new technologies and enhanced quality of data collected, a combination of different monitoring methods can be used to assess the pavement condition along its entire length. Equipment, able to collect significant amounts of data are used, such as traffic speed deflectometers, ground penetrating radar, laser 3D, remote sensing, digital cameras, etc. One of the challenges is the data processing, due to the significant amount collected, sensitivity to test condition and correlations between different tests. This chapter addresses the main equipment and testing methodologies available nowadays for structural evaluation and integrity detection. Traffic considerations are additionally covered, as they are responsible for the pavement loading. The knowledge about its magnitude and the way that they are transmitted from different vehicles configurations are also presented. Additionally, future trends for data integration, such as Building Information Modelling are referred herein, with some examples. In addition, approaches that are still at prototype phase, such as remote sensing detection of settlements are mentioned. The main challenges and future perspectives of continuous structural monitoring are referred herein.

O Regulamento Geral das Edificações Urbanas, normalmente designado pelo acrónimo RGEU, é a cúpula dosistema de normas técnicas da construção em Portugal. O RGEU foi aprovado em 1951, pelo Decreto-Lei n.º38 382, de 7 de agosto de 1951, substituindo o Regulamento de Salubridade das Edificações Urbanas,aprovado por Decreto de 14 de fevereiro de 1903, e outros instrumentos regulamentares e diplomas legaisde 1914, 1927, 1928 e 1945. Desde a sua entrada em vigor, o RGEU sofreu treze alterações materiais ourevogações parciais, a mais recente das quais foi operada pelo Decreto-Lei n.º 220/2008, de 12 de novembro.De entre as várias alterações, a mais significativa foi a alteração aprovada pelo Decreto-Lei n.º 650/75, de 18 de novembro, que introduziu um conjunto de exigências sobre dimensões mínimas a observar nascomunicações verticais, no pé-direito e nos espaços funcionais das habitações.

Urban water services make use of extensive networked infrastructures - water supply and drainage systems. Efficient management of these services relies on the quality of measurements of hydraulic variables in pipes and sewers to support robust analysis of systems

Urban water services make use of extensive networked infrastructures

The flow through an eroding dam is three-dimensional and exhibits several length scales. Laboratory experiments are fundamental to characterize these flows. Instrumentation and monitoring techniques in laboratory environ-ment must be able to capture this complexity and scale amplitude and should be, preferentially, non-intrusive, particularly if the failure event is related with earth dams, where erosion patterns may be affected by instrument intrusiveness. Re-garding embankment dam failures, the processes usually subjected to great scru-tiny require the measurement of the breach effluent flow (BEF), the breach mor-phological evolution (through longitudinal and transversal profiles as well as 3D reconstructions) and the flow velocity over the dam and through the breach. This chapter presents advances in instrumentation to be deployed in dam breach la-boratory tests and novel measuring methods made possible with such instrumen-tation. Emphasis is placed on the description of the critical components of the instruments, with emphasis on digital imagery, and on image analysis and post-processing techniques. A detailed exposition of existent methods, and respective evaluation of its suitability in the context of laboratory work, is presented.

Railway tracks may be perceived as simple physical structures, but in fact they entail a significant level of complexity as refers to the assessment and prediction of their transient and long-term behaviors. These mostly result from the intrinsic characteristics of their components and of the dynamic interaction with the suc-cessive passing trains at different speeds and with different loading characteris-tics. The railway industry