ABSTRACT
The structural evaluation of bridges has become an essential topic since many of these structures have achieved their service life and some damage may occur. The current methods for detection of damage are visual inspection and local non destructive evaluation (NDE) methods. In order to be efficient, these techniques need a priori global location of the damage and easy access to the damage zone. For global damage detection, methods based on dynamic monitoring have been proposed. They can be categorized into four different levels: 1) detecting if the structure is damaged; 2) finding the location of damage; 3) estimating the severity of damage and 4) evaluating the remaining service life of the structure. A review of those methods was provided by Sohn et al (2003).
