Information management systems for dam safety control. The Portuguese experience

Abstract

The safety of the system formed by the dam, its foundation, the reservoir, and the downstream area of the dam should be evaluated on its structural, hydraulic, operational and environmental components.

In particular, the structural safety assessment of an existing dam is based on the establishment of correlations between the main loads, its structural properties, and its structural responses. The values of observed responses are compared to predicted values obtained by structural behaviour models or by historical observations.

Over the years, new developments in technological devices have been introduced in this field, namely through the implementation of automated data acquisition systems. This evolution, associated with very important progresses in information systems technology, has raised new challenges, but has also provided new opportunities, such as the development of data management systems that allow the person responsible for dam safety to access data, interpret the information, and make decisions, as quickly as possible.

The National Laboratory for Civil Engineering (LNEC) has developed the GestBarragens system, which was designed and developed using a modular approach, based on a common data architecture that can be accessed through a Web interface.

This paper intends to show the improvements that the GestBarragens system provides to the activities related to the safety control of more than one hundred large concrete and embankment dams, including the observation of several physical quantities measured by the monitoring systems, the interpretation of the information and the transmission of warnings to the entities responsible for the dam’s safety.

As the development of the GestBarragens system is an ongoing process, future developments will also be addressed in this paper.