Regional-scale bridge health monitoring: survey of current methods and roadmap for future opportunities under changing climate

Climate-related extreme events are becoming increasingly frequent, posing significant threats to bridges, which are critical components of transportation infrastructure. This paper offers an overview of recent advancements in methodologies and technologies for conducting structural health monitoring (SHM) of bridges over large areas, where deploying sensors on every structure may be cost-prohibitive for local administrations. It specifically examines two approaches that have garnered interest in the past decade: indirect SHM, which involves instrumenting vehicles and analyzing their dynamic responses to infer information about bridges, and satellite interferometric radar data, which offer static displacement measurements for large regions and has recently been exploited for civil SHM purposes. Additionally, it reviews the recent developments in population-based SHM, which facilitates knowledge-sharing among structures with similar characteristics within a population. Through an analysis of the advantages and limitations of these three rapidly developing research areas, the paper outlines future opportunities and lays the roadmap for a comprehensive “regional-scale SHM” approach based on remote and/or crowdsourced data, supported by population-level analyses. Specific topics addressed include strategies for similarity assessment among monitored structures, available data sources, and feature extraction/integration approaches for different scenarios.