AI and Remote Sensing for Resilient and Sustainable Built Environments: A Review of Current Methods, Open Data and Future Directions

Critical infrastructure, such as transport networks, underpins economic growth by enabling mobility and trade. However, ageing assets, climate change impacts (e.g., extreme weather, rising sea levels), and hybrid threats ranging from natural disasters to cyber attacks and conflicts pose growing risks to their resilience and functionality. This review paper explores how emerging digital technologies, specifically Artificial Intelligence (AI), can enhance damage assessment and monitoring of transport infrastructure. A systematic literature review examines existing AI models and datasets for assessing damage in roads, bridges, and other critical infrastructure impacted by natural disasters. Special focus is given to the unique challenges and opportunities associated with bridge damage detection due to their structural complexity and critical role in connectivity. The integration of SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) data with AI models is also discussed, with the review revealing a critical research gap: a scarcity of studies applying AI models to SAR data for comprehensive bridge damage assessment. Therefore, this review aims to identify the research gaps and provide foundations for AI-driven solutions for assessing and monitoring critical transport infrastructures.

Tiered approach for rapid damage characterisation of infrastructure enabled by remote sensing and deep learning technologies

Critical infrastructure such as bridges are systematically targeted during wars and conflicts. This is because critical infrastructure is vital for enabling connectivity and transportation of people and goods, and hence, underpinning the national and international defence planning and economic growth. Mass destruction of bridges, along with minimal or no accessibility to these assets during natural and anthropogenic disasters, prevents us from delivering rapid recovery. As a result, systemic resilience is drastically reduced. A solution to this challenge is to use technology for stand-off observations. Yet, no method exists to characterise damage at different scales, i.e. regional, asset, and structural (component), and more so there is little or no systematic correlation between assessments at scale. We propose an integrated three-level tiered approach to fill this capability gap, and we demonstrate the methods for damage characterisation enabled by fit-for-purpose digital technologies. Next, this method is applied and validated to a case study in Ukraine that includes 17 bridges. From macro to micro, we deploy technology at scale, from Sentinel-1 SAR images, crowdsourced information, and high-resolution images to deep learning for damaged infrastructure. For the first time, the interferometric coherence difference and semantic segmentation of images were deployed to improve the reliability of damage characterisations from regional to infrastructure component level, when enhanced assessment accuracy is required. This integrated method improves the speed of decision-making, and thus, enhances resilience. Keywords: critical infrastructure, damage characterisation, targeted attacks, restoration