ABSTRACT
With economic, environmental, and material resources becoming increasingly scarce, more sustainable solutions for the management of civil infrastructure are required. Accurately evaluating the structural capacity is primordial to avoid unnecessary replacement of existing bridges. The assessment of existing structures is currently made based on construction drawings, recorded information on the materials used, and visual inspection. The remaining uncertainties on the structural behavior are compensated by conservatism assumptions. Monitoring data collected through bridge load testing, structural performance monitoring, and non-destructive tests provide additional information on the structural behavior leading to decision regarding bridge safety and reducing considerably the costs and environmental impacts of management. Nonetheless, collecting this information is often costly as the sensor deployment and the data management are expensive. The monitoring costs may not always be justified by the benefits in terms of information gain. This paper proposes a methodology to evaluate the potential impact of monitoring activities on the evaluation of structural performance. A full-scale bridge in Switzerland is used to assess the usefulness of several monitoring techniques. Results show that the monitoring leads to more accurate evaluations of structural verifications, and each method provides complementary information.
