• Journal of the Korea institute for structural maintenance and inspection
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.169-175
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• 2001

Bridge load rating calculations provide a basis for determining the safe load capacity of bridge. Load rating requires engineering judgement in determining a rating value that is applicable to maintaining the safe use of the bridge and arriving at posting and permit decisions. Load testing is an effective means in calculating the rating value of bridge. In Korea, load carrying capacity of bridge is modified by response modification factor that is determined from comparisons of measured values and analysis results. The response modification factor may be corrupted by vehicle location error that is defined as the gap of test vehicle location between load testing and analysis. In this study, the effects of vehicle location error to structural response and response modification factor are investigated, and a new method for evaluating response modification factor is proposed. The random data analysis shows that the proposed method is less sensitive to vehicle location error than the present method.

• Journal of the Korea institute for structural maintenance and inspection
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.177-184
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• 1998

The equation of motion on the vehicle-bridge system is established as the simultaneous equations which are combined the equation of vehicle and bridge by the interaction elements. A vehicle element is modeled as lumped masses supported by springs and dashpots, and a bridge element with pavement roughness is modeled as beam elements. An interaction element is defined to consist of a bridge element and the suspension units of the vehicle resting on the element. By the dynamic condensation method, the degrees of the freedom are eliminated, and compared with all the degrees of freedom on the bridge, the efforts of calculation is decreased. Thus, although a very small computational error is occured, the present technique appears to be computationally more efficient. It is particularly suitable for the simulation of bridges with a series of vehicles moving on the deck.

• Journal of the Korea institute for structural maintenance and inspection
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• v.25 no.5
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• pp.114-126
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• 2021

This paper compared bridge maintenance in United Stated, United Kingdom, Japan, and Korea. Bridges play an essential role in transportation network and in the economic production process. To provide a desirable level of service to the public within limited budgets, it is required to provide effective bridge maintenance activities (e.g. inspection and repair/rehabilitation) at acceptable level of bridge service. A number of bridges are expected to age rapidly in Korea, which will be the excess burden of government. Since several countries have experienced a number of deteriorated bridges because of aging, the countries aforementioned in this study have already developed comprehensive bridge maintenance programs such as inspection practice and repair/rehabilitation techniques. Therefore, the goal of this paper is to synthesize and to compare useful knowledge on bridge maintenance and bridge crack repair/restoration of deteriorated concrete bridge in the four countries. Finally, recommendations that will serve as guidance to transportation agencies for potential enhancements to bridge maintenance and bridge repairs are presented.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.13 no.6
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• pp.901-925
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• 2014

The reliability of a Bridge management System depends on the quality of visual inspection and the reliable estimation of bridge condition rating. However, the current practices of visual inspection have been identified with several limitations, such as: they are time-consuming, provide incomplete information, and their reliance on inspectors' experience. To overcome such limitations, this paper presents an approach of automating the prediction of condition rating for bridges based on digital image analysis. The proposed methodology encompasses image acquisition, development of 3D visualization model, image processing, and condition rating model. Under this method, scaling defect in concrete bridge components is considered as a candidate defect and the guidelines in the Ontario Structure Inspection Manual (OSIM) have been adopted for developing and testing the proposed method. The automated algorithms for scaling depth prediction and mapping of condition ratings are based on training of back propagation neural networks. The result of developed models showed better prediction capability of condition rating over the existing methods such as, Naïve Bayes Classifiers and Bagged Decision Tree.

• Journal of the Korea institute for structural maintenance and inspection
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• v.26 no.5
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• pp.161-170
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• 2022

The maintenance of bridges installed in rivers is carried out through facility safety inspection and repair & reinforcement procedures according to the results. Many studies have been so far conducted on the safety check of the bridge upperstructure because of the ease of access. However as it is impossible to directly investigate whether the pier foundation installed in the river has been scoured. Management of underwater foundations has remained based on theory. In this study, the scour of the bridge foundation installed in such a river was realized in 3D form by using an echo sounder and VRS. This made it possible to predict the scour pattern through comparison and analysis with the ground height of the riverbed at the time of the bridge installation. Based on these results, if the pier foundation is used as an initial data to determine whether or not local scour is present and to predict long-term scouring, bridge collapse due to foundation scour can be prevented.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.335-349
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• 2023

Bridges constantly undergo deterioration and damage, the most common ones being concrete damage and exposed rebar. Periodic inspection of bridges to identify damages can aid in their quick remediation. Likewise, identifying components can provide context for damage assessment and help gauge a bridge's state of interaction with its surroundings. Current inspection techniques rely on manual site visits, which can be time-consuming and costly. More recently, robotic inspection assisted by autonomous data analytics based on Computer Vision (CV) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been viewed as a suitable alternative to manual inspection because of its efficiency and accuracy. To aid research in this avenue, this study performs a comparative assessment of different architectures, loss functions, and ensembling strategies for the autonomous segmentation of bridge components and damages. The experiments lead to several interesting discoveries. Nested Reg-UNet architecture is found to outperform five other state-of-the-art architectures in both damage and component segmentation tasks. The architecture is built by combining a Nested UNet style dense configuration with a pretrained RegNet encoder. In terms of the mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) metric, the Nested Reg-UNet architecture provides an improvement of 2.86% on the damage segmentation task and 1.66% on the component segmentation task compared to the state-of-the-art UNet architecture. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that incorporating the Lovasz-Softmax loss function to counter class imbalance can boost performance by 3.44% in the component segmentation task over the most employed alternative, weighted Cross Entropy (wCE). Finally, weighted softmax ensembling is found to be quite effective when used synchronously with the Nested Reg-UNet architecture by providing mIoU improvement of 0.74% in the component segmentation task and 1.14% in the damage segmentation task over a single-architecture baseline. Overall, the best mIoU of 92.50% for the component segmentation task and 84.19% for the damage segmentation task validate the feasibility of these techniques for autonomous bridge component and damage segmentation using RGB images.

• Journal of the Korea institute for structural maintenance and inspection
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.61-68
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• 2017

Bridge decks are members that rapidly deteriorated due to various environmental factors such as heavy vehicle and deicing salt, etc. As the lifespan of bridges built in Korea increases, it is expected that the demand for replacing the deteriorated bridge decks will increase. In other countries, Accelerated Bridge Construction technology using precast decks is already actively being used as a countermeasure for replacement demand of deteriorated bridge decks. In this study, bridge decks deterioration models are proposed by collecting and analysing the condition index data of domestic bridge decks. Also, the future replacement demands of deteriorated bridge decks in terms of replacement time and replacement scale are predicted.

• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.43 no.2
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• pp.165-173
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• 2023

The data management and the evaluation of defects in the bridge are generally conducted based on inspection and diagnosis data, including the exterior damage map and defect quantity table prepared by periodic inspection. Since most of these data are written in 2D-based documents and are difficult to digitize in a standardized manner, it is challenging to utilize them beyond the defined functionality. This study proposed methods to efficiently build a BIM (Building Information Modeling)-based bridge damage model from raw data of inspection report and to manage and utilize the damage information linking to bridge model through the spread sheet data generated by COBie (Construction Operations Building Information Exchange). In addition, a method to conduct the condition assessment of defects in bridge was proposed based on an automatic evaluation process using digitized bridge member and damage information. The proposed methods were tested using superstructure of PSC-I girder concrete bridge, and the efficiency and effectiveness of the methods were verified.

• Magazine of the Korea Institute for Structural Maintenance and Inspection
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.18-21
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• 2015

• Journal of the Korea institute for structural maintenance and inspection
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• v.6 no.4
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• pp.209-217
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• 2002

The effects on structures caused by the replacement of the bridge bearings are investigated in this study. The bearings of the bridge are seriously deteriorated because of the breakage of lower concrete and the corrosion of the bearing itself. Also, the negative reaction states are created at some bearings on the abutment. Then, the bridge has occurred excessive vibrations and severe noise and impact whenever heavy trucks pass the above joints. The existing bearings are replaced using the adjustable bearing. The height of the bearings is adjusted to minimize the level difference of above joint and also to induce the appropriate distribution of live loads The effects of replacing the bearings are investigated by measuring the behaviors of the bridge without and with replacing works. The results without replacing the bearing show that the distribution of displacements and stresses is distorted in comparison with the analytical results. Also the bridge without replacing the bearing shows that the impact and vibration from the heavy trucks are larger than those with replacing the bearing. Load carrying capacity of the bridge increase about 1.8 times through replacing the bearing. The above results show that the structural performance of the bridge is improved by replacing only bridge bearings.