Current Research The objective of the research is to develop a holistic methodology to evaluate the structural condition of a bridge that

considers the non-stationary effect of the traffic loading acting on the bridge through the coupling of existing structural health monitoring (SHM) techniques with intelligent transportation technology (ITS). This research will integrate ITS and SHM to obtain non-stationary statistical process control (SPC) charts to detect the presence of damage while considering changes in the operational environment (i.e varying traffic loading). Such integration is expected to reduce the frequency at which false diagnosis are produced by the system. In order to capture the time varying behavior of the operational environment, time-dependent auto-regressive moving average (TARMA) models will be used. As their model parameters are functions of time, TARMA models will allow the mass of the bridge to be updated continuously to represent the changes in the traffic conditions of the bridge.

Fig. 1: Stationary SPC chart vs. Non-stationary SPC chart

The proposed research will used ITS technology to monitor the state of the traffic acting on the bridge structure and implement this information into SHM techniques. The characteristic most important to this research is the additional mass imparted by the vehicles traversing the bridge. In order to obtain this pertinent information, the ITS component of the system must have the ability to determine the traffic density, and therefore the approximate mass of the vehicles, acting on the bridge structure. The first three tasks of this research focus on determining this additional mass. The remaining tasks focus on simulating the vehicular mass acting on a bridge through the use of a finite element model, and evaluating the static and dynamic responses of the bridge structure. The final task of this research will consist of introducing damage to the structure and repeating tasks 4, 5, and 6. Both ARMA and TARMA models will then be used to evaluate the bridge. Awards University of South Carolina Discovery Day Research Competition Winner