Structural health monitoring and structural identification for long-span bridges

Structural Health Monitoring and Structural Identification are concepts that are more frequently being applied to improve the reliability and effectiveness of operational and maintenance management for constructed systems. This paper describes why the need for such paradigms continues to grow, and discusses many of the limitations associated with current approaches for assessing and evaluating the performance and condition of civil infrastructure. Several examples of full-scale testing programs applied to long-span bridges are presented to illustrate typical application scenarios and quantitative characterization methods that can be employed. These examples also describe possible sources of uncertainty that can be encountered when executing experimental characterization programs for long span bridges.