Summer Course on Structural Health Monitoring 2027 (5th Edition)

BIP - Blended Intensive Program

5 ECTS | June 14-18, 2027, 30h in-person | 15h remotely | MSc and PhD Students

We are happy to announce the 5th Edition of the Summer Course on Structural Health Monitoring (SHM). The in-person sessions will take place in Lisbon, Portugal, from June 14–18, 2027. For this new edition, we are preparing a fresh set of upgrades, including stronger involvement from industry partners, further reinforcing the connection between SHM research and engineering practice. More details coming soon. Stay tuned!

This Blended Intensive Programme (BIP), supported by the Erasmus+ Programme, focuses on Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) and combines a 15-hour virtual component with 30 hours of activities during the physical mobility period.

The main goal of this summer course is to introduce the concept of SHM applied to bridges and special civil structures to MSc and PhD students from several European institutions. SHM is posed in the context of a statistical pattern recognition paradigm, rooted in the artificial intelligence field, to support damage identification and risk-informed integrity management. Machine learning algorithms are essential to perform damage identification by learning (or modeling) the structural behavior from experience (past data), following the same principle as the human brain.

In order to balance the general concept and the applicability of SHM, this course has been designed to allow students to gain a basic knowledge of SHM with hands-on experiences to demonstrate how SHM can be used for assessing the condition of structural systems, along with lectures to give some insight into the theory and application examples.

Keywords

Structural Health Monitoring, Bridges, Wind Turbines, Machine Learning, Finite Element Modeling, Digital Twins, Risk, Resilience, Value of Information, Climate Change

Pre-registration (participants and industrial partners)

A limited number of vacancies is available for participants. This registration form serves as a pre-enrolment to express your interest and does not guarantee final admission until all required steps are completed.

If you are an industry partner willing to collaborate, just send an email to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Funding source

Erasmus+ Program through Blended Intensive Program (BIP), Student Mobility of Education (SME), and Staff Mobility for Teaching (SMT). The BIP covers expenses related to the course organization. SMT and SME cover expenses related to the travel and housing of students in Lisbon.

Which are the host and partner institutions?

Lusófona University is the host and responsible for the organization and funding of the course through BIP. Each partner institution is responsible for finding students and staff members through SME and SMT (this funding must be coordinated with the international office of each partner institution).

Who can participate?

MSc and PhD students from countries participating in the Erasmus+ Program who are interested in speeding up the learning process of SHM posed in the context of a statistical pattern recognition paradigm.

Course material

PowerPoints, books, and research articles: all course materials are available on a virtual drive. Students are encouraged to bring their own laptops.

Student evaluation

The evaluation includes three main components: 1) individual homework, 2) project report and presentation, and 3) individual assessment. Small groups of four, five, or six participants are formed to design an SHM system or a damage identification strategy for laboratory or real-world structures. Each group is assigned a supervisor for guidance. Each group's outcome must be documented in a report and defended in an oral examination, conducted publicly in the form of a seminar. Students are graded, and the grades will be awarded according to the university’s Education and Examination Regulations.

Virtual component

The main goal of the virtual component is to give remote lectures to introduce the concept of SHM. It will also assign homework to participants and host the final virtual presentations of the final projects.

Remote lectures:

Introduction to SHM
Statistical pattern recognition paradigm
Data-based modeling (unsupervised learning)
SHM in Action: hands-on experience
Physics-informed SHM with hybrid-based modeling (supervised learning)
Trending SHM topics: The role of transfer learning for SHM and the role of SHM for bridge adaptation to climate change
BIM for SHM
Limitations, grand challenges, and trends

Physical mobility period

The physical mobility period of one week includes lectures, laboratory activities, the Industry Session, and the Bridge Tour.

In-person lectures:

Field instrumentation
Risk and resilience
Probabilistic FE modeling
Value of information
Vision-based monitoring
SHM for Heritage Structures & Preservation
Sensing in Action (lab activities)

Learning outcomes:

Describe the historical and current real-world applications of damage identification in the civil engineering field, especially in bridges.
Conduct damage identification using vibration-based SHM.
Calibrate, optimize, and apply finite element model updating for deterministic and probabilistic approaches.
Select the best damage-identification method based on damage type.
Evaluate the results of damage identification for quality control critically.
Quantify the value of monitoring information to support decision-making.
Run damage identification analysis on commercial software, such as MATLAB and Robot.

Instructors (to be confirmed)

Eloi Figueiredo, Lusófona University, Portugal
Ionut Moldovan, Lusófona University, Portugal
Luca Pèla, Barcelona Tech - UPC, Spain
Luís Oliveira Santos, National Laboratory of Civil Engineering, Portugal
Marek Salamak, Silesian University of Technology, Poland
Marcin Jasiński, Silesian University of Technology, Poland
Maria Pina Limongelli, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
Michael Havbro Faber, Lusófona University, Portugal
Mihai Nedelcu, Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Pier Francesco Giordano, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
Roland Kromanis, University of Twente, Netherlands
Semih Gonen, Barcelona Tech - UPC, Spain

Invited Instructors (to be confirmed)

João Canto, Lusófona University, Portugal
Ana Silva, Lusófona University, Portugal
Mohammad Abedi, Lusófona University, Portugal
Nuno Santos, Lusófona University, Portugal
Magdalena Roxana Păcurar, Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Daniel Colmenares, DEWESoft

General schedule

Previous editions

Notes

A Transcript of Records and a Certificate of Attendance will be issued at the end of the course.
For more information, please contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
This is an international course that involves a lot of people, so there may be changes at any time.
Last update: September 30, 2026.