Structural Health Monitoring of Road Systems: From the Network Analysis to the Single Bridge Assessment

Structural health monitoring (SHM) of the built environment, exploiting the integrated use of measures deriving from on-site monitoring systems and remote ones, is a very promising research topic. The elaboration of satellite remote sensing data referred to scenes on the Earth’s surface gives preliminary information at a territorial scale to depict the overall deformation conditions of the area of interest. Through such an analysis in a built area, it is possible to identify the buildings or infrastructures affected by the most significative deformation values, which condition needs to be studied more in detail. For these constructions, a higher degree of information can be obtained, e.g., through on-site inspections and monitoring. Information obtained from satellite data and any in situ monitoring can be incorporated into a single platform through visualization and data management of the entire monitoring system, whether satellite or traditional. In particular, in terms of traditional monitoring, an experimental test for validate the methodology has been carried out on a small prototype bridge in laboratory. For this test has been evaluated the frequency and the modal shape with an automatic Frequency Domain Decomposition (FDD) algorithm and transmitted the post-processed data to a remote device. This paper described the methodological framework and architecture of a bridge monitoring system that includes traditional and satellite monitoring techniques. Finally, an architecture for managing the huge amount of data from such monitoring systems was developed in order to optimize the storage of local and remote devices.