Structural Health Monitoring of Fugro Parking Garage

At Fugro’s Nootdorp office, the multi-storey parking garage experiences daily structural deformation caused by employee vehicle loads. With increasing vehicle weights, driven by SUVs and electric cars, parking garages across Europe are being pushed beyond their original design assumptions.

Fugro initiated this project to validate TotaLite’s accuracy in a real-world building environment while also gaining insight into how continuous monitoring could support the future safety of aging parking structures.

The Challenge

Many parking garages are nearing or exceeding their designed lifetime, while simultaneously carrying heavier loads than ever before. Located in densely populated areas, structural failure presents serious safety risks.

Fugro wanted to understand:

• How the concrete slabs deflect under daily traffic

• Whether TotaLite could match the accuracy of traditional systems

• How automated, continuous monitoring could replace complex multi-sensor setups

The goal was to capture subtle deflections, detect recurring patterns, and validate performance against established monitoring methods.

Our Solution

TotaLite was deployed to measure slab deflection in real time:

• Monitoring prisms were installed on the garage ceiling to track vertical movement

• Multiple targets were positioned in rows, allowing deflection shapes to be observed across three cross-sections

• A single TotaLite sensor covered distances up to 35 metres

For validation purposes, Fugro simultaneously installed:

• One automated total station

• Four tilt meters on a single cross-section

The monitoring campaign ran continuously for six months.

The Results

The project demonstrated that TotaLite achieved 1.5 mgon accuracy, equivalent to approximately 1 mm precision at 40 metres—matching the performance of an automated total station.

Key outcomes included:

• Clear detection of daily and weekly deformation cycles caused by employee parking patterns

• Typical daytime slab displacement of ~1 mm, with identifiable peaks during working hours

• Recognition of public holidays through the absence of loading events

• Successful monitoring of three cross-sections with a single TotaLite sensor—an equivalent setup would have required 12 tilt sensors

Both TotaLite and the automated total station revealed identical deformation trends, validating TotaLite’s reliability while dramatically simplifying the monitoring setup.

“TotaLite has proven to be an accurate monitoring solution — and the best solution for monitoring parking garages.”

Ronald Plugge
Fugro Land Business Director NL