Vital to our infrastructure, bridges require regular maintenance to ensure safety for the cars, trucks, rail cars and people regularly traversing them. Many bridges are 50 years or older, with citizens traveling across structurally deficient bridges every day.
“Structural health monitoring of bridges clarifies which repairs need to be prioritized,” says IEEE Senior Member Clint Andrews. “The deferred maintenance backlog has become so severe that it is easy to just throw up your hands and invest opportunistically in repairs, but the proper way is to prioritize based on the timely status information.”