A BIM Based Approach for Structural Health Monitoring of Bridges

Abstract

With the development of bridges, independent condition assessment of large-scale bridges has garnered significant attention over the past few decades. Data-driven structural health monitoring (SHM) techniques offer valuable information on the existing health of the structures, maintain safety, and uninterrupted use under varied operational conditions by undertaking timely risk and hazard mitigation. Traditional approaches, however, are not enough to monitor a large amount of SHM data and conduct systematic decision making for future maintenance. In this paper, a bridge health monitoring system is developed through the combination of building information modeling (BIM) and traditional bridge health monitoring that can organize and visualize a considerable amount of sensor data and subsequent structural health information over a prolonged period. The system can identify the structural damage by evaluating the data from sensors using Wigner-Ville distribution (WVD) in bilinear time-frequency analysis. A BIM-enabled platform is utilized to develop the proposed visualization tool for a long-span bridge and enable automated sensor data inventory into the BIM environment. The system has been tested for its robustness and functionality against the development requirements, and the results showed promising potential to support more effective bridge information management.