ABSTRACT
An efficient health monitoring scheme for damage detection in civil engineering structures, like bridges, using on-line monitoring is being developed in order to identify any possible damage. The main idea is to perform structural assessment helping owners in achieving a better structural maintenance. The basis of the present work is the treatment of uncertainties, which are among the basic common difficulties to face when modelling structures. Civil engineering infrastructures contain uncertainty in their physical or geometric parameters, such as Young modulus, Poisson ratio or length. In this work, uncertainties are described as interval values. This means that each parameter is not quantified as a fixed real number, but as taking any value between the lower and the upper limits of an interval. Within this approach the input parameters of civil engineering models are replaced by intervals (Garcia et al. 2004). The result of this process is also an interval value which is obtained using the system of equations and theorems of modal interval analysis (MIA).
