ABSTRACT
Structural Health monitoring (SHM) can be defined as measurement of operating and loading environment and critical responses of a system to track and evaluate incidents, anomalies, damage and deterioration. Transportation infrastructure, especially long-span bridges, is one of the main subjects of application for SHM. Implementation of SHM can reveal global and local structural parameters, generate data for structural identification, lead to effective maintenance and operation, improve future designs and help diagnosing pre-& post-hazard conditions and emergency management. All SHM applications involve the basic phases of planning, instrumentation, data collection, processing and decision making. Type, scope and scale of the application determine types of sensor and data acquisition devices and evaluation methods. Advancing technology is making it simple and inexpensive to deploy large numbers of sensors and collect realtime or archived data. Therefore, data management technologies and data processing algorithms need to be developed in order to be able to make use of the data in the most effective way to supplement bridge management systems.
