Novel health monitoring strategies for Highway Bridges and Constructed Facilities are of primary significance to the vitality of our economy. Using the latest enabling technologies, the objectives of health monitoring are to detect and assess the level of damage to the civil infrastructure due to severe loading (caused by natural loads or man-made events) and/or progressive environmental deterioration.

Damage identification is performed based on identification of changes in salient response features of the structure, as measured by deployed sensor arrays. This proposed broad interdisciplinary research aims to develop a next-generation, versatile, efficient, and practical health monitoring strategy. A flexible and scalable software framework will be developed to integrate real-time heterogeneous sensor data, database and archiving systems, computer vision, data analysis and interpretation, numerical simulation of complex structural systems, visualization, probabilistic risk analysis, and rational statistical decision-making procedures. The new framework will also speed up the discovery of new knowledge related to the progressive or sudden deterioration of civil infrastructure systems and the corresponding damage mechanisms.

The entire project will be developed around actual Bridge Testbeds in cooperation with the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans), and Industry Partners. These Testbeds will be densely instrumented and continuously monitored, and the recorded response databases will be made available for maximum possible use by interested researchers and engineers worldwide.

This material is based upon work supported by the US National Science Foundation under ITR Grant No. 0205720. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation (NSF).