PRISMA – PHOTONICS FOR RAILWAY INFRASTRUCTURE: SMART MAINTENANCE AND ASSESSMENT

PRISMA is built upon two key ideas. The first is that the adoption of predictive diagnostics systems delivers significant benefits—both economic and in terms of safety—for the entire railway infrastructure. The second concerns the great potential of fibre-optic sensing, a technology that is ideally suited to the development of advanced monitoring systems yet requires dedicated solutions to ensure reliable and robust deployment.

The concept of smart maintenance is a pillar of modern management and maintenance strategies, optimizing the life cycle of structures and reducing unnecessary interventions.

Prof. Paolo Bettini, Principal Investigator, has brought into PRISMA the experience gained over the years through research projects developed across a wide range of industrial sectors—from aerospace to oil & gas, from automotive to civil engineering.

Building on this experience, PRISMA is carried out in collaboration with GCF – Generale Costruzioni Ferroviarie, a leading Italian company in the construction and maintenance of railway track infrastructure, ensuring a strong focus on industrial application and validation of the proposed solutions.

As in the aerospace sector—where health and usage monitoring systems are widely adopted and sensing technologies are increasingly applied to complex, multifunctional structures, true “smart” structures inspired by biomimetics—the railway transport sector is now also called upon to undergo a transformation capable of enhancing safety, efficiency, and passenger comfort, while simultaneously containing operational costs.

To achieve this goal, the infrastructure must be integrated with a network of dedicated sensors capable of feeding diagnostic algorithms with a continuous, real-time flow of data, combined with information provided by Artificial Intelligence.

PRISMA develops the entire smart maintenance chain through:

• The design and realization of innovative composite sensing modules, within which fibre optic sensors are integrated, protected and made suitable for quick and easy installation at critical points in the railway network, thus enabling fibre-optic technology for operational field use.
• The development of numerical models, data processing algorithms and predictive diagnostic strategies, necessary to transform the acquired signals into reliable information on the health status of the infrastructure.

Thanks to this dual innovation — hardware and software — it will be possible to monitor the railway network in real time, without interrupting service, and implement the new paradigm of predictive maintenance.

The expected benefits include increased safety, improved operational efficiency and stronger economic sustainability.

Short CV

Paolo Bettini is Associate Professor of Aerospace Technologies and Materials at the Department of Aerospace Science and Technology at the Politecnico di Milano.

His research focuses on new materials and technologies for aerospace structures, with particular emphasis on smart materials, smart structures, and advanced composites.

Already a winner of the Switch2Product Innovation Challenge, in 2025 he won a FISA Grant from the MUR for the development of a structural predictive diagnostic system based on photonic technology and is currently involved in an important regional project related to railways.

Since 2018, he has served as a point of reference for the Italian Space Agency on advanced materials for space applications.

He has participated in numerous European and national research projects and has collaborated with leading companies and research institutions, including Leonardo, Prysmian, CNR, and CIRA. He is the author of over 150 publications, holds five patents, and has supervised more than 140 master’s and PhD theses.