Monitoring and data‐informed assessment of steel bridges ‐ lessons learned from a case study

To support the asset owners and operators, in the IM‐SAFE project a framework for life‐cycle asset management has been developed, highly interrelated with the framework for data‐informed safety assessment. A practical decision‐making process has been proposed, aiming at enable proactive maintenance of transport infrastructure, supported by data from monitoring, inspection and testing. The decision making flow, which is a part of the proposed decision‐making process, describes the different stages of the assessment of new and existing structures, focusing on various levels (network, system and component) and taking into account the available data.

This paper presents a case study which demonstrates application of the decision making flow for the Galecopper bridge in the Netherlands where corrosion related damage near the anchorage of the stay cables has been discovered during inspection and on which structural health monitoring (SHM) has been applied for diagnostics and support of the asset management. The paper discusses the factual application of the theoretical decision making procedure on different conceptual levels, adding additional dimension to the decision making flow, based on the practical experience and lessons learned (retrospective).