Summary Review of Structural Health Monitoring Applications for Highway Bridges

The state-of-the art paper provides an extensive literature review on the work pertaining to structural health monitoring (SHM) systems used to investigate the structural integrity of highway bridges. The focus of this review is on identifying the SHM research efforts that include damage detection, structural capacity evaluation, and remaining service life estimates on such structures. These efforts have spanned a broad range of data processing methods devoted to tracking changes in structural characteristics for damage detection, codified frameworks enabling structural capacity estimating, and reliability analysis to predict remaining life. Our findings are that a large number of studies considered damage detection by data processing methods, whereas a relatively small number of studies were devoted to the estimation of structural capacities and the remaining service life of bridges. We conclude that the critical gaps include a lack of validated SHM systems that use ambient data to examine design code-based structural integrity and remaining life of highway bridges.