Background and motivation

Structural health monitoring (SHM) of civil infrastructure has evolved into a research area that integrates sensing, data analysis, modeling, and decision-making. Structure and SHM system can no longer be regarded as isolated entities, but must be considered as a coupled cyber-physical system. Due to the coupled nature of the cyber-physical system, threat categories, as shown in Figure 1, no longer only comprise

• anomalies in the physical structure (including damage) or
• internal SHM system faults (including sensor faults), but also
• external cyberattacks (including sabotage).

The combination of all capabilities required to withstand such threats can be subsumed under the term “digital immune system”. While the term digital immune system is increasingly used in other research areas, existing approaches are often either buzzword-driven or insufficiently grounded in immunological principles derived from biological immune systems. In particular, concepts that explicitly address the coupled cyber-physical nature of SHM-enabled civil infrastructure have not yet been reported.

Research objectives

The proposed 12-months project aims to initiate a long-term German-Greek collaboration to establish the scientific foundations for biologically inspired digital immune systems for civil infrastructure. The joint work will formalize the problem through a structured analysis of requirements and threat categories, abstract and categorize relevant components and processes of the biological immune system into an engineering-oriented metamodel, and derive a traceable, requirement-driven cross-domain mapping to digital counterparts in SHM, sensing, control, and security. Building on the aforementioned scientific foundations, the collaboration will consolidate an implementation-independent conceptual reference architecture that specifies layers, elements and modules as well as information flows, serving as a blueprint for modeling, simulation, and validation of digital immune systems under typical scenarios involving structural anomalies, system faults, and cyberattacks.

Expected results

Beyond the scientific outputs, the project will lay the strategic and organizational groundwork for establishing an International Center for Sustainable Digital and Autonomous Constructions (SDAC) as a long-term institutional platform for German-Greek collaboration. Thereby, digital immune systems for civil infrastructure will serve as the central scientific anchor, while the SDAC Center will enable sustained researcher exchange, joint supervision of PhD candidates, coordinated research agendas, and long-term capacity building in sustainable, digital, and autonomous construction. Overall, the proposed work is expected to enhance the resilience of cyber-physical SHM systems for civil infrastructure, while fostering durable interdisciplinary cooperation at the interface of civil engineering, computer science, and immunology. .