Integrated structural health monitoring in bridge engineering

Integrated structural health monitoring (SHM) uses the mechanism analysis, monitoring technology and data analytics to diagnose the classification, location and significance of structural situations (e.g., sudden or cumulative damages) to ensure the functionality and operation of bridges. Integrated SHM systems have improved the maintenance, management and decision-making of bridges by continuously monitoring and evaluating working conditions. This review article discusses the current process and future trends of bridge monitoring focusing on the cutting-edge SHM technologies, transmission and analytics methods of the sensing data, and prediction and early-warning models. In particular, four extensively applied sensing technologies (i.e., fiber optic sensors, piezoelectric sensors, global navigation satellite system and magnetostrictive sensors) are reviewed and compared, the wireless data transmission approaches (i.e., ZigBee, Bluetooth, NB-IoT, Wi-Fi, LoRa) are discussed, the artificial intelligence-based data processing methods are presented, and the performance prediction and early warning systems are summarized. In the end, the challenges and future research avenues of the current integrated SHM systems are discussed with respect to the characteristics of bridges.