Multi-Source Monitoring and Surveying Data for Collapse Risk Identification of Inner-City Quay Walls in Amsterdam, The Netherlands

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Abstract
Historical quay walls in low-lying delta cities are increasingly challenged by ageing materials, changing load conditions, and long-term ground deformations. In the inner-city of Amsterdam (The Netherlands), a dense network of masonry quay walls founded on timber piles requires continuous prioritization to manage collapse risk at municipal scale. This paper presents a multi-source monitoring-based framework that integrates conventional (ground-based) and innovative (remote-sensing) techniques with damage information collected during in-situ surveys to support the identification of potentially critical quay walls. Displacement information derived from terrestrial instruments (acquired in both vertical and horizontal directions) and satellite Multi-temporal Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (MT-InSAR) recorded along the line-of-sight (LOS) are combined with qualitative indicators describing damage conditions (e.g. deformations and cracks on apron or wall façade) and kinematic behaviour (e.g. tilting, bulging) observed during in-situ inspections. Rather than aiming at detailed structural and stability verification of the single retaining structure (quay wall), the proposed analysis focuses on extracting consistent patterns between observed damage and recorded displacements, posing the base knowledge for developing a methodological procedure that allows the investigation of existing cause-effect relationships and the identification of the most probable collapse mechanisms. The results achieved highlights how multi-source monitoring and surveying sources can be jointly interpreted to support, at municipal scale, risk-informed decision making and the planning of mitigation strategies for historical retaining structures.

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