PSI - Issue 78

Daniele Sivori et al. / Procedia Structural Integrity 78 (2026) 481–488

483

(a)

(b)

Fig. 1. (a) Aerial picture of the Saint Lawrence Cathedral in Genoa; (b) structural plan of the church.

3. Design of the dynamic monitoring system: challenges, solutions and opportunities This section delves into the design and operation of a permanent structural monitoring system for the church. Its primary objective is to continuously measure the driving forces and the resulting structural response, thereby identifying any unexpected behavior in the operational regime and potential deterioration in the structural conditions. These considerations are based, theoretically, on established practices in the literature regarding seismic and Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) of heritage structures and, technically, on the outcomes of preliminary studies and ambient vibration measurements conducted on the building in the past years (Degli Abbati, Sivori et al. 2024). The design primarily aims to achieve these fundamental system characteristics:  Permanent and continuous: the instrumentation is installed and remains uninterruptedly operative on the structure, subject to ordinary maintenance interventions;  Real-time: data is acquired, transmitted and stored locally with capabilities for real-time processing;  Integrated: Capable of measuring both environmental inputs (e.g., temperature) and dynamic inputs (e.g., seismic forcing like microtremors and earthquakes), as well as the vibrational response (outputs);  Distributed: covering all the main structural macro-elements of the church.  Scalable: Allowing for easy expansion or integration with other heterogeneous measurements. The following Sections outline a preliminary measurement system, which satisfies these minimum requirements and can be integrated with additional permanent or temporary sensors to enhance the coverage across the structure. The inclusion of instruments for measuring local environmental and atmospheric conditions allows for characterizing their influence on the structure's vibrational behavior. These effects are particularly relevant for masonry structures (Azzara et al. 2018, Pellegrini et al. 2023, Sivori et al. 2025) and should be filtered out from