Rheticus® Safeway: an operational EO satellite monitoring service for infrastructure maintenance support

Ground motion events and changes seriously threaten infrastructure and public safety, with landslides capable of severely damaging roads and railways, sometimes leading to casualties. The growing frequency and intensity of extreme natural phenomena like landslides and subsidence, driven partly by human activities and climate change, highlight the need for advanced monitoring solutions. Planetek Italia, together with GAP, has developed Rheticus® Safeway, an operational service designed to support predictive maintenance of roads, railways, and bridges. This initiative, supported by the Italian Space Agency (ASI) under the I4DP Market project, aligns with the risk classification, safety assessment, and monitoring guidelines established by the Italian Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport. Through the ASI project, significant operational and technological developments have been made to enhance the service’s scalability, making it accessible on both a European and global scale. The service relies on satellite-based ground motion data, processed using multitemporal interferometry algorithms with SAR Sentinel-1 (S-1) and COSMO-SkyMed (CSK) data, along with land cover change detection from multispectral Sentinel-2 (S-2) imagery. To ensure the scalability of the service at European level, the European Ground Motion Service (EGMS) is used as input data to analyse the infrastructure affected by motion, with an additional high-resolution ground motion map based on COSMO-SkyMed where needed. By leveraging vertical satellite-based geo-analytics, Rheticus Safeway supports proactive infrastructure maintenance, contributing to the long-term safety and resilience of transportation networks.

Activity carried out under ASI contract I4DP Market.