 How come that we initiated this cost action where we have been working a few years until we find or we found this picture we are describing here with these few sentences and this work was associated to the IRIS project. It was associated to my PhD thesis and further research. So the field of structural health monitoring is really well developed in terms of science, in terms of technology, in terms of methods available. But we still have the feeling that the potentials of SHM are not fully utilized. And we found that developing SHM to maximize the value of information reveals high industrial potentials. We have demonstrated that quite a few times starting with my PhD thesis and of course quantifying the value of SHM utilizing the value of information is challenging for us. And this is how we started to initiate the cost action and this is what we provide a project vision on quantifying the value of structural health monitoring with potentials as we have demonstrated beyond science and engineering. And we are already experiencing a large interest in this cost action. What is cost? What project do we have actually? We have a networking and dissemination project between researchers, engineers and scholars across Europe and cost aims to facilitate scientific breakthroughs leading to new concepts and products. It aims to build capacity by connecting high quality scientific communities and giving networking opportunities to early stage researchers and to increase the impact on policy makers, regulatory bodies and also in the private sector. So this is the project we have and we see here the aims of cost. The aims also of our cost action goes beyond science and engineering. So we are having quite some aims. So and this is now an overview over the cost action TU-1402. I will go through the action, we will say something on the aims and objectives like you see here. Then I will go further in the scientific planning come to our working plan throughout 2015. So this year and then I will say also some words to the agenda of today. So the main objective of the cost action TU-1402 as we formulated it in the memorandum of understanding is to facilitate sustainable societal developments, true improvements of resource efficiency, productivity, robustness, reliability and safety and design and asset management for infrastructures by optimizing structural health monitoring systems. The aims here are to provide and to disseminate the framework with approaches to quantify, assess and optimize the benefits of SHM for structures and thus we are aiming at an improved economic efficiency and operation maintenance and asset management of structures and infrastructures. The main deliverables for this cost action are a chapter of the probabilistic model code where we cover the theoretical aspects and methods, a library of tools and algorithms for the application of the quantification of the value of SHM, a guideline which addresses practicing engineers so that these assessments can be done in practice and a well-developed homepage including video streams of keynote presentations where this was also one of the practical things I wanted to announce. We have a complete video recording of our sessions. Yes, we have also started you know with the homepage we will develop that further and fifth point main deliverable is dedicated dissemination activities, training courses for engineers and researchers, regular workshops and special sessions at international conferences. So this workshop today is the I should say starting point but I think we already progressed so this is about to accelerate a little and to connect so that we can work efficiently. What is the impact we are aiming at? It is of course development of the scientific field for quantifying the value of SHM. It is about project proposals so this is a good platform for developing project proposals and I think this is also the way our cost action should be utilized. We have gone through an assessment process already on European level and this is a good argument I think to all proposals written well at least we hope so that this can be utilized as a good argument for further research proposals and this has already also started I have been given some statements for proposals on national level that the research projects are highly supported and highly relevant for the cost action here and of course the impact will be that the scientific field will be made accessible and practicable by the dissemination including the guidelines. But we also aim at an impact on European economy and society so we are aiming at an improved economic efficiency in the continued development operation and maintenance and asset management of infrastructures. We aim at new business opportunities for SMEs but also for large enterprises. I'm very happy that SMEs and large enterprises are also part of the action here are quite a few in this room and we are aiming at or we want to impact by increased competitiveness in the building construction and structural engineering industry. What is the scientific program we have divided that into five tasks that concerns the theoretical framework that is first task the second task is SHM strategy and structural performance third is methods and tools fourth is case studies portfolio and five is development of guidelines. I would like to highlight the task two because here we have been putting SHM strategies and structural performance together and I think this is one key element of the cost action to bring the researchers together in this working group because we observe that normally researchers also engineers are working either with SHM strategies or with structural performance and I think this is really a key element for the further development of structural health monitoring. This is our scientific program a little more detailed again you find here the tasks and what is important here oh that works is the time plan so in the first one and a half years or two years it's the first two years working task one and task two are active and in the second year or yes in the second year task three joins and also task four and at the end of the action we are going to task five to the development of guidelines this is our working groups but the working groups are identical with the tasks so we have a working group on the theoretical framework on SHM strategies and structural performance methods and tools and then we have the working group four and five which are going across which are building upon what we have developed in the theoretical framework in working group this was working group one working group two and working group three and across all these activities we have the dissemination a special working group to coordinate the dissemination the organization is very close to the normal organization which is provided by cost so we have the management committee which is responsible for the management of the action we have then a smaller group a steering committee which works in more detail works in preparation for management committee meetings and decisions what is little going beyond what is required by cost and how it's usually organized is that we have an innovation committee and an advisory board within the advisory boards we are asking very experienced senior people to to join and maybe that's the form how we can communicate with these people who usually don't have much time to follow a complete workshop but we could associate them to the steering committee meetings or to the steering committee and and they are can give us a very efficient advice on how to proceed with the cost action and what specific challenges to tackle and so on so we have already included in our cost action various research institutions engineering consultants industrial enterprises as well as operators of infrastructures we have external advisors we are very happy about them and we will include them in the next meetings and workshops we have started to write the proposal with 50 participants who expressed their interest in joining this cost action to join the full proposal we were 20 European countries at that time now even before the first workshop we have difficulties in controlling the number of participants we now have 110 from 25 European countries well this this is a this is great no matter but of course we have limited management and budget resources so we should be a little careful about that growth is not everything and we are aiming at being a very organized cost action and we don't hunt any records in number of participants or countries so a few words on the quantification of structural health monitoring so you've for sure recognized this scheme here so I think that the for the quantification of structural health monitoring decision theoretical background is necessary we need the SHM strategies and the structural performance I think this may be something at a very generic level where we can refer to when in the individual contributions in the presentations in the papers and we may think of the value of structural health monitoring as the life cycle benefits with structural health monitoring B1 minus B0 without structural health monitoring so that goes also to the original yeah theory which was goes back to Rife and Schleife 1961 so the value of information is the utility increase we can further detail this framework what we have developed we can show this with the decision tree so well this is maybe maybe still a little generic level which we may refer to when talking and well this is maybe still still generic but there may be other notations there have been publications in parallel so but maybe this should be something on on the theoretical level we should keep well and this is also an example from one of the first studies we did on the quantification of the value of structural health monitoring for the fatigue deteriorating structure and strain gauge monitoring and this was also something we which contributed to the situation that we were convinced to initiate this course action because we were convinced to impact industry with these numbers here so that's a relative a relative value of structural health monitoring so it's normalized to B0 and we see that high so the highest value would be one here high value of structural health monitoring can be achieved independently of the design and operation reliability so what is our plan for the first grand period this is 2015 this is now of course we we have this workshop here this is one of the key elements of the plan so and we we are combining quite a few meetings namely a management committee meeting this will be yes I will come to the agenda steering committee meeting so this is the small group below the management committee we have the working group meetings we have working group sessions we do a workshop and we disseminate here the idea of this course action we have another workshop it's working group one and working group two workshop in Istanbul we are we should start to organize today and tomorrow the organizers are here and here we are combining also quite a quite a few meetings further activities in the first grand period is the further development of the web page and we have short term scientific missions so this goes to researchers especially early stage researchers to we can support them when they want to join for a certain time another institution so further breaking down the first workshop what are the days what are the aims of today and tomorrow so the aim is a development of common understanding of the aims and the ideas within our network we are also disseminating with this workshop and the report we are going to produce and also with the website we are disseminating the ideas of this action and of course we need to follow our scientific plan so we need to progress here within the workshop on the clarification of the theory on quantifying the value of SHM the formulation of the theory for applications and the categorization of SHM strategies and structural performance but the last point is partly under discussion I think but this is also something we have to work on today and tomorrow so the agenda you have all seen that we have today the working group one session theoretical framework the working group three session methods and tools working group four case studies portfolio so working group one is already in our scientific plan active but I'm very happy that also working group three and four started working and that they are here and we can find and discuss on the interfaces with the other working groups we remember that working group four was for instance across the first three working groups we have after the working group four session a presentation from Helder let's innovate so I'm looking forward to that we then have the steering committee meeting and the workshop dinner this there will be some more information throughout the day on the workshop dinner tomorrow morning we start we start a little earlier than today with the with our largest session working group two SHM strategies and structural performance and we then have a combined working group five and six session have a concluding discussion after the lunch break and then have parallel working group meetings so here's the intention that each of the working groups are making plans how to further proceed how to further work and we close our workshop with the management committee meeting so that was all from my side I would like to close the opening presentation with the quote of Henry Ford coming together is beginning keeping together as progress working together success thank you