<title>GIS-based bridge structural health monitoring and management system</title>

Abstract

For monitoring and evaluating structural health for the three long-span cable-supported bridges, namely, Tsing Ma Bridge, Kap Shui Mun Bridge and Ting Kua Bridge in Hong Kong, Wind And Structural Health Monitoring System (WASHMS) has been established by the Highway Department of the local Government in Hong Kong. To investigate the possibilities of further enhancing the functions of the existing system in storage, retrieve and distribute huge amount of monitoring data for the WASHMS, a study of developing GIS-based bridge structural health monitoring and management system is carried out and presented in this paper. This system is developed by integrating GIS, large database and network techniques. The system is able to run on a Local Area Network or Internet. GIS is applied to manage spatial information on location of bridges on a regional map and position of sensors on a 3D bridge model. It also provides users with interactive interface between user and the system. Large database system, such as SQL Sever or Oracle, is used to manage huge amount of dataset captured from the sensors. In the Sever-Side, by using the data input and database maintain module, the raw data come from WASHMS and the analyzed results can be imported into the central database in real time, and is backup from time to time. For those data that are not changed or changed infrequently, such as regional map for bridges, location information and attributes about sensors, a static database is established to store them. In the Client-Side, user can not only access the raw data from various sensors from the central database at any time, but also visualize or even further process the data. Based on above designed prototype of GIS-based bridge structural health monitoring and management system. It is demonstrated by the prototype that the developed system is feasible. Furthermore, the implementation issues including system design, technique solutions, database structure design and function design are also presented in this paper.