• Smart Structures and Systems
• /
• v.9 no.1
• /
• pp.1-20
• /
• 2012

In bridge engineering, maintenance strategies and thus budgetary demands are highly influenced by construction type and quality of design. Nowadays bridge owners and planners tend to include life-cycle cost analyses in their decision processes regarding the overall design trying to optimize structural reliability and durability within financial constraints. Smart permanent and short term monitoring can reduce the associated risk of new design concepts by observing the performance of structural components during prescribed time periods. The objectives of this paper are the discussion and analysis of influence line or influence field approaches in terms of (a) an efficient incorporation of monitoring information in the structural performance assessment, (b) an efficient characterization of performance indicators for the assessment of structures, (c) the ability of optimizing the positions of sensors of a monitoring system, and (d) the ability of checking the robustness of the monitoring systems applied to a structure. The proposed influence line- model correction approach has been applied to an integrative monitoring system that has been installed for the performance assessment of an existing three-span jointless bridge.