SPECIAL SESSION #11

Gianni Fenu

University of Cagliari, DMI

• fenu@unica.it

Donatella Rita Fiorino

University of Cagliari, DICAAR

• donatellar.fiorino@unica.it

Roberto Tonelli

University of Cagliari, DMI

Defense infrastructure represents a strategic asset whose operational efficiency, resilience, and security are essential for ensuring military readiness and the continuity of defense operations. Military facilities, including historical barracks, modern operational buildings, maintenance facilities, naval and air bases, and other typology of strategic assets, are increasingly required to meet evolving operational, environmental, and security requirements. At the same time, the adoption of advanced digital technologies is creating new opportunities to improve infrastructure governance, predictive maintenance, performance assessment, and lifecycle management.

This special session focuses on innovative digital technologies supporting the secure management, performance enhancement (stuctural, energy, hydraulic), functional rehabilitation, and certification of defense infrastructure assets. Particular attention will be devoted to hybrid interdisciplinary approaches integrating architectural and engineering traditional fields with Artificial Intelligence, Building Information Modeling (BIM), GIS, IoT sensing, Digital Twins, blockchain technologies, predictive analytics, and decision-support systems to enable intelligent asset governance.

In this hybrid context, the session welcomes contributions addressing methodologies for technical assessment and life cycle management of military facilities, including monitoring, property management and border control, economic assessment, intervention cost estimation, documentation traceability and certification processes.

The objective of the session is to bring together academics, engineers, architects, industry and technology providers, with defense stakeholders working on advanced methodologies, protocols and tools for the modernization and sustainable management of defense infrastructures. By promoting the integration of engineering, architecture, emerging digital technologies, and data-driven decision models, the session aims at fostering collaborative research on secure, intelligent, and resilient governance frameworks capable of supporting advanced use of heterogeneous data sources, strategic planning, infrastructure rationalization, and operational readiness across the defense infrastructural portfolio.