JSPS  JAPAN – TÜBİTAK  TÜRKİYE
BILATERAL  SEMINAR

Welcome Note

Dear Colleagues and Friends,

In recent years, the construction and maintenance of civil infrastructure have seen various attempts to improve efficiency and to visualize disaster risk through data sharing (DS) across multiple organizations, including ICT-based construction, construction DX (Digital Transformation), and BIM/CIM (Building/Construction Information Modeling, Management). Water infrastructure—represented by agricultural water systems and water supply and sewerage networks—is the central theme of this seminar and constitutes social infrastructure indispensable to human survival. When an earthquake strikes, further degradation of the production and living environment caused by damage to water infrastructure is unavoidable. This is not a problem confined to engineering: it calls for the collective wisdom of medicine, agriculture, the social sciences, and other disciplines working across conventional boundaries.

The 1st International Seminar on Optimal Management and Non-destructive Testing for Civil and Industrial Infrastructure (OMNI 2026) brings together researchers in civil engineering and agricultural engineering to discuss the advancement of maintenance and management, seismic disaster mitigation, and rapid recovery after earthquake disasters, addressing water infrastructure as well as urban and industrial infrastructure. This initiative builds on the bilateral international joint research between the Faculty of Engineering, Ege University (Republic of Türkiye) and the Faculty of Agriculture, Niigata University (Japan), which has continued since 2014. Through this research exchange between the two countries, we have placed particular emphasis on the active development of early-career researchers. A major motivation for this effort is that both Türkiye and Japan have experienced extremely severe earthquake disasters.

In Türkiye, the Türkiye–Syria earthquake of February 2023 affected more than 20 million people and damaged approximately 210,000 buildings. In Japan, even limiting the list to recent decades, numerous earthquake disasters have been recorded, including the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake (1995), the Mid-Niigata Prefecture Earthquake (2004), the Great East Japan Earthquake (2011), the Kumamoto Earthquake (2016), and the Noto Peninsula Earthquake (2024). From the perspective of disaster prevention and mitigation, the development and proposal of advanced non-destructive testing technologies by researchers in agriculture and engineering from both countries offers comprehensive preparation for the compound disasters anticipated in the future—disasters that threaten not only urban infrastructure but also the very foundations of our survival, including food production. In addition to these technical efforts, an administrative and academic exchange between the cities of İzmir and Niigata is scheduled for April 2026, led by Prof. Dr. Yalçın Alver. Through such collaboration with public authorities, and not through technological development alone, we are seeking practical measures to protect our living and production environments from disaster.

It is our sincere hope that OMNI 2026 will contribute to research and development across national borders and to industry–government–academia collaboration. The seminar features 9 presenters from the Republic of Türkiye and 7 from Japan, 16 in total, of whom 9 are students or early-career researchers. We look forward to seeing the young participants of this seminar grow into bridges between Türkiye and Japan in the years ahead.

Finally, this seminar has been organized with the support of the JSPS–TÜBİTAK Bilateral Joint Research Program (JPJSBP220269903 and TÜBİTAK 223N061). We express our sincere gratitude to Prof. Dr. Yalçın Alver and Prof. Dr. Ninel Alver of the Faculty of Engineering, Ege University, the host institution on the Turkish side and our joint implementers, for their generous cooperation. We also thank the participating members from the Japanese side—Dr. Toru Nakada, Senior Researcher, Institute for Rural Engineering, NARO; Assoc. Prof. Kentaro Ohno, Tokyo Metropolitan University; Assoc. Prof. Yohei Asada, Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology; Assoc. Prof. So Fujiyama, Mie University; and Assist. Prof. Taiki Hagiwara, Yamaguchi University—for their participation and for their assistance with the organization of the seminar.

Important Dates

Any change will be announced by e-mail to the registered participants.

Presentation Format

Oral presentation: 15 minutes for presentation and 5 minutes for Q&A and discussion. A two-page manuscript, including figures, tables and references, is published in this book.

Short communication: no oral presentation is scheduled. In place of a talk, four pages are allocated in this book, including figures, tables and references, so that the work can be reported more fully in writing.

All sessions are held in English. Real-time interpretation and live subtitles are provided in Japanese, English and Turkish.

About the Seminar

Aim and Scope

Infrastructure is ageing worldwide while disasters grow more severe and the time permitted for recovery grows shorter. Drawing on the experience of two seismically active nations and on documented cases of infrastructure failure, this volume brings together non-destructive testing, automation, and data-driven decision-making across civil and rural engineering, treating deterioration, disaster, and recovery not as separate problems but as three phases of a single infrastructure lifecycle.

Methodological distinctions between data-driven and physics-based approaches remain meaningful, and this volume does not set them aside. But the paradigm shift brought about by AI has made those distinctions insufficient as the sole axis of organization: what matters increasingly is what is being evaluated and for whom. The sessions are therefore divided by object and purpose rather than by method. Session A addresses non-destructive testing and the evaluation of materials and structures; Session B addresses integrated infrastructure management, where human agency — operation, inspection planning and maintenance decision-making — becomes part of the system under study. In civil and rural engineering, human involvement is not an external factor to be abstracted away but an inseparable part of how infrastructure functions, and any framework that aspires to describe these systems fully will eventually have to account for it.

Topics

• Non-destructive testing of concrete and steel structures: acoustic emission, ultrasonic and impact elastic wave methods, impact-echo, infrared thermography, X-ray CT
• Physics-based structural simulation, seismic analysis and performance assessment of weirs, dams and headworks
• Hydraulic performance evaluation: flow analysis, transient pressure, leakage detection and water-level management in pipeline systems
• Machine learning and AI for predictive maintenance, anomaly detection, knowledge discovery and automated decision-making
• Case studies of infrastructure failure and post-incident condition analysis
• Transportation engineering, micromobility, emergency access and post-disaster recovery
• Rural and irrigation infrastructure: open channels, canal gates, drainage pump stations and their remote management

Seminar Structure

Day 1 (29 September) consists of an opening, two keynote lectures and two oral sessions, followed by a banquet. Every oral presentation is published in this book as a two-page manuscript. Contributions accepted as short communications are not presented orally; in place of a talk they are allocated four pages. There is no poster session in this edition. Day 2 (30 September) is a technical tour to Tahtalı Dam, covering the dam embankment and the water intake facility.

Programme at a Glance

Programme by Session

Sessions are organized by day and time block. The session chair is listed in the session header. Short communications are not presented orally and therefore do not appear in the timetable; they are published in this book after the oral sessions. Manuscripts of all contributions follow the programme.

15 min for presentation and 5 min for Q&A and discussion

15 min for presentation and 5 min for Q&A and discussion

Short Communications — published in the book, not presented orally

Keynote Lectures

Dr. Toru Nakada

Institute for Rural Engineering, National Agriculture and Food Research Organization (NARO), Japan

LECTURE

From Remote Monitoring to Predictive Management: Digital Twins of Drainage Pump Stations and Agricultural Drainage Networks for Flood Resilience

Abstract

About the Speaker

Prof. Dr. Yalçın Alver

Department of Civil Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Ege University, İzmir, Türkiye

LECTURE

Resilient Transportation Lifelines Under Flood Hazards: A Macroscopic Framework for Pre-Disaster Planning, Active Response, and Post-Disaster Evacuation

Abstract

About the Speaker

Technical Tour — Tahtalı Dam

Wednesday, 30 September 2026

The second day of OMNI 2026 is devoted to a technical tour of Tahtalı Dam, one of the principal water-supply structures serving İzmir. The tour covers the dam embankment and the water intake facility, and is intended to give participants a shared physical reference for the discussions of the first day.

The tour is recorded and afterwards turned into an archive of two layers: the audio of the commentary and discussion exchanged at each point of the walk, and a three-dimensional model of the site reconstructed from 360° imagery by Structure-from-Motion. The spoken record is anchored to the position at which it was captured, so that anyone opening the archive can move through the model and hear what was said where it was said.

Programme

Participants are asked to wear appropriate footwear and to follow the instructions of the site staff at all times. Photography restrictions, if any, will be announced on site.

Location — Tahtalı Dam

Site Gallery — Tahtalı Dam

New Challenges — Hybrid & Online Experience

Two technologies bring the field to every participant, on-site and online. They are introduced here not as a supplement to the programme, but as a part of it: OMNI 2026 is also a trial of how an international seminar in this field can be conducted.

Linked Special Issue — Buildings (MDPI)

Digital Twins for Civil and Industrial Structures: Data-Physics Fusion-Driven Methods for Hazard Risk Management

Contributions presented at OMNI 2026 are warmly invited to the linked Special Issue of Buildings (MDPI). Submission to the seminar is abstract-only; full-paper submission to the Special Issue is optional. Article Processing Charge discounts are available on request — 50% for invited speakers and 20% for general participants — and are confirmed by the Editorial Office in advance of submission. If eight or more peer-reviewed papers are published, the collection is issued as a Special Issue Reprint with an ISBN.

Scope of the Special Issue

• 3D shape reconstruction and internal condition detection integrating visible and invisible infrastructure domains, using satellite remote sensing, UAV-LiDAR, acoustic techniques and underwater sensing
• Physics-based structural simulation and seismic analysis coupled with the real condition of the structure for performance assessment
• Hydraulic performance evaluation: flow analysis, leakage detection, pipeline water-level management and flood simulation for pump stations
• Machine learning and AI for predictive maintenance, anomaly detection, knowledge discovery and automated decision-making
• Disaster management systems integrating rapid damage assessment, traffic management for emergency response and recovery planning

Original research, comprehensive reviews and case studies are welcome, covering civil, architectural and industrial structures such as buildings, bridges, roads, dams, headworks, channels, pipelines and pump stations.

Organization

Seminar Chairs

Co-Chairs

Organizing Committee

Session Chairs

Venue & Access

Day 1 — Seminar Venue

Vocational School, Ege University
Erzene Mah., Ege Üniversitesi Kampüsü, 35040 Bornova / İzmir, Türkiye

Day 2 — Technical Tour

Tahtalı Dam, İzmir, Türkiye. The tour covers the dam embankment, the water intake facility and the gate.

Online Participation

Remote participants join through the hybrid platform. Connection details will be circulated by e-mail before the seminar.

The Venue