Award for Best Article on Structural Health Monitoring of Bridges

Lusófona University was awarded the Best Paper Prize at the international conference Experimental Vibration Analysis for Civil Engineering Structures (EVACES 2025), held this July at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto, bringing together over 380 delegates and 315 scientific papers.

The awarded paper, entitled “Stochastic transfer learning strategy for monitoring twin concrete bridges”, lists Leonardo Ferreira from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) as first author. The researcher completed a one-year internship at Lusófona University as part of a joint project funded by FCT-CAPES (2019.00164.CBM).

This research, initiated in 2017 under the coordination of Lusófona University, is one of the most comprehensive and innovative studies in the field of Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) of bridges. A multidisciplinary team brought together:

• Involvement of transport infrastructure entities (Brazilian road authority, DNIT),
• Operational modal analysis,
• Long-term monitoring using mobile phones and the App4SHM application,
• Probabilistic modelling using finite elements via Bayesian inference,
• Transfer learning for cross-domain adaptation,
• Machine learning for damage detection.

The project resulted from the collaboration of an international multidisciplinary team, involving higher education institutions and transport infrastructure entities such as the Brazilian National Department of Transport Infrastructure (DNIT).

The full version of this study was recently published in the journal Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing (MSSP).

Acknowledgements
- EVACES International Association
- Maria Pina Limongelli
- Álvaro Cunha
- DEWEsoft (Rok Mesar)

Partner Universities and Institutions
- Lusófona University – Lisbon University Centre
- Universidade Estadual Paulista Ilha Solteira (UNESP)
- Federal University of Pará Belém (UFPA)
- Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG)
- FAPESP
- CNPq
- CAPES
- EVACES 2025
- RISE