Funded by the European Research Council [Grant No. 307836]
With funding from the prestigious ERC Consolidator Grant Program, RETURN addressed important challenges at the forefront of geotechnical engineering and building conservation by introducing an entirely new workflow and largely unexploited data source for the prediction of building damage from tunnel-induced subsidence. The project made fundamental and ground-breaking advances in the collection and processing of city-scale, aerial laser scanning by avoiding any reliance on existing data for building location identification, respective data affiliation, or building feature recognition. This created a set of techniques that are robust, scalable, and widely applicable to a broad range of communities with unreinforced masonry buildings. This also laid the groundwork to rapidly generate and deploy city-scale, computational models for emergency management and disaster response, as well as for the growing field of environmental modelling.