Jérémie Voumard
Director: Prof. Dr. Michel Jaboyedoff
Jury: Dr. Marc-Henri Derron, Dr. Andrea Pedrazzini, Dr. Nicolas Pollet, Prof. Dr. Suren Erkmann
Geological and hydro-geological natural hazards, as landslides and floods, are a threat to many transport networks built in mountainous areas. These risks, that are often small in intensity, are poorly evaluated or unknown.
This doctoral thesis focuses on the characterization and quantification of natural hazards that impact Swiss communication tracks. It also explores various remote sensing techniques dedicated to the survey of areas around traffic lanes.
A database has been created to characterize the many small events that regularly affect roads and railway lines in order to compensate the lack of knowledge. The number of events and their trends – such as their spatio-temporal distribution, the weather, the geology, the direct damages or the types of affected tracks- are thus known at the national level over a period of five years (2012-2016). It shows that a natural event, on average, disrupts the traffic every 2.1 days and that the events occur mostly during the months of June and July, late afternoon. Direct costs were estimated at CHF 4 million per year, with an average cost per event estimated at 23 400 francs.
In order to characterize the approaches to roads and railways, we have developed and tested the photogrammetric technique “on-motion Structure from Motion”, whose cost is reasonable. This remote sensing technic makes possible to obtain colorized and georeferenced 3D point clouds from images taken by four action cameras placed on a moving vehicle. Its accuracy has been evaluated in laboratory conditions and on many sites. It was also compared with seven other traditional surveillance techniques to identify advantages and disadvantages.
This work highlights the impact and consequences of small-scale natural hazards that, taken as a whole, are not negligible for society. In addition, this study demonstrates that low-cost survey technic can compete with more expensive traditional survey techniques.
Keywords: Natural hazards, transportation networks, on-motion Structure for Motion, topographical survey.