ABSTRACT
ABSTRACT: Safety evaluation and repair/rehabilitation of existing bridge structures due to environmental and traffic loads become increasingly important according to the rapid increase of the number of the damaged or deteriorated structures. System identification method can be one of the important tools for the safety evaluation. System identification method has been developed to assess the physical damages directly in the viewpoints of mechanical behavior instead of microscopic damages such as cracks, chemical deteriorations like in NDT (non-destructive test). This method has many potential merits. First, it can localize damages from wide range measurements of structures. Works for more detail investigation can be reduced. Second, the identified quantities can be usually directly used in structural analysis. This means that many applications are possible as in structural analysis.
