Recent Advancements and Future Trends in Indirect Bridge Health Monitoring

Bridges hold an imperative role in the transportation network and infrastructure. Continuous monitoring of their condition is crucial for the efficient operation of transportation facilities. Conventional bridge monitoring has relied on direct sensor instrumentation on the bridge to obtain the bridge response. Indirect bridge health monitoring (iBHM) leverages the moving traffic over the specific bridge of interest. The benefit of iBHM lies in the fact that bridge instrumentation is no longer required since the moving vehicle is instrumented with sensors. The collected data can be used to identify the dynamic characteristics of the bridge. Additionally, the method can be used to detect damage using the information of the vehicle bridge interaction. This paper systematically reviews the recent research progress in iBHM, and the review is organized based on four main groups, namely single test vehicles, tractor-trailer vehicles, crowdsourced/smartphone monitoring, and contact point (CP) response. The primary classification is further divided according to the nature of the investigation, which includes theoretical and numerical investigations, laboratory tests, and full-scale validations. After a concise and systematic review, the existing challenges and future recommendations are outlined. It is anticipated that this review will provide valuable guidance for researchers and practitioners of bridge engineering to understand better the evolution, development, and future trends of iBHM.