On Population-based structural health monitoring for bridges

The maintenance and repair of bridges (and other large scale infrastructure projects) is a major area which could benefit from Structural Health Monitoring technology. Inspections on can take long time require many people, are therefore conducted infrequently. This low frequency inspection leaves the chance that damage dangerous critical failures occur during timeframes between inspections. It might even be case an fails to identify sub-surface damage. Therefore some form continuous monitoring desirable, especially if such systems reliably detect However, application SHM made challenging by cost practicability obtaining damage-state data for bridges. Over lifetime single bridge, it hoped failure will never occur, only small number possible states occur. also unpractical intentionally structures obtain data. Population-based structural health seeks overcome obstacle limited available structure, allowing shared similar structures. Bridges represent interesting challenge PBSHM as each bridge unique. As such, assessment how required. To provide this assessment, one must develop abstract representation using perform comparison. paper describes use general approach assessing similarity structures, applied several examples representative common types bridges, show in field.