ABSTRACT
The world economy has undergone a significant leap in the last few decades with the construction of many large-scale infrastructures. The construction of many long span bridges is usually accompanied by the installation of a structural health monitoring system. Some of these structures have been monitored on their performances for over a decade, and yet there is no condition assessment method that can use the collected data to yield useful information for the bridge owner towards the maintenance scheduling and on the evolution of the structural conditions of the bridge. Also, many of the highways and bridges constructed in the fifties and sixties in the United States and Europe are aging with the wear from usage and poor maintenance. The failure of these highways and bridges would be disastrous for the economy of the area and for the whole country. The collapse of two major bridges in JiuJiang, in China and in Minneapolis in the United States in 2007, highlighted the urgent need for a simple and realistic approach for condition assessment integrated with the reliability rating of the bridge structure. However, the limited resources of short-term structural health monitoring of the stock of infrastructures in any country is noted. The existing practice of condition assessment of highway bridges is based on visual
inspections or theoretical/numerical models and is typically oriented towards the detection of local anomalies, localization and identification. Other technical approaches that use low load level static and dynamic tests, underestimate the local anomalies which are often functions of the load level.
