Adaptive Structural Health Monitoring Framework for Bridges using Vehicle-Carried Sensors

Abstract In order to sustain a smoothly-operating economy, reliable and healthy infrastructure is critical. Civil infrastructure including bridges, roads, buildings, and many more are designed for long time operation with minimal interruption. However, in developed countries, the strong majority of operating structures were built decades ago and have already passed their designated lifespan, while their operation rate has not been discounted but even boosted. This concerning trend is now a global economic challenge that requires drastic financial investments if supposed to be addressed traditionally. The financial burden of such solutions is extremely high so that it has encouraged scientists to distribute resources attentively between monitoring and repairing costs. Structural health monitoring is a collective term for any advanced engineering technique that is able to estimate the existing status of structures given sensory data. By advancements in sensor technology, dense sensor networks have been installed for detailed monitoring of structures. Despite its promising achievements, the method is yet expensive and cannot be upscaled to a large number of structures. Mobile sensing as an alternative paradigm strives to dramatically reduce the sensor setup costs while maintaining the data information as high and dense as possible. The idea of mobile sensing is promising and feasible, yet further developments are required to establish industry-friendly solutions. In this thesis, practical and scalable solutions based on realistic mobile sensing data are developed in order to shrink the gap between theory and applied scenarios.