Thanks to its highly qualified staff and the specialised know-how it can boast, Italferr has established a series of significant partnerships with important scientific associations and various national and international academic institutions, promoting conventions and agreements for technology transfer, support for training and teaching as well as for the development and enhancement of research in all fields of engineering, necessary for specific railway needs.

In the field of civil engineering, Italferr has held the presidency since 2013 of Società Italiana Gallerie (Italian Tunnelling Society - SIG), a technical and scientific non-profit association that disseminates know-how in the field of tunnel design and construction and of large underground works, promulgating the culture of underground engineering.

In addition, since 2014 Italferr has participated in the Presidential Board of Associazione Geotecnica Italiana (Italian Geotechnical Association - AGI), which disseminates geotechnical culture in the scientific and professional scenario.

Algorithms and techniques that make use of satellite tracking to monitor even very small deformations of the ground, software programs that allow the infrastructure to be placed within the environmental context by verifying its impacts, useful in the process of sharing with decision-makers, are just a few examples of the innovative tools developed by Italferr in collaboration with academia.

Continuous research and development activities in the engineering field have also led Italferr to the achievement of important results in the field of continuous and permanent monitoring of railway infrastructure, through the processing and adoption of a new Structural Health Monitoring Concept developed in a digital environment, applied from the design phases to the construction and management phases of the projects. 

Structural Health Monitoring systems, through the monitoring of the structural behaviour and of the mechanical and physicochemical characteristics of the materials of the structures, make it possible to control the occurrence of alteration phenomena during operation and to record their evolution over time, thus allowing the timely adoption of targeted interventions with a view to Predictive Maintenance.

The SHM Concept developed by Italferr includes a multi-level, multi-disciplinary approach and relies on a structured information system, the result of the convergence of BIM (Building Information Modelling) and Digital Twin, representative of the digitised version of the structure.

The Digital Twin of the structure is the tool capable of providing immediate access to multiple sources of information (surveys, design documentation, field data, structural processing and analysis) by exploiting a single graphical interface based on the digital model.