Monitoring on federal highways bridges: current situation, future opportunities & digital implementation

Monitoring on road bridges in Germany is rare and mostly designed to deal with existing damages and deficits, as a survey of the Federal Ministry of Digital and Transport in Germany has shown in 2020. Other use cases are monitoring to support structural inspection, monitoring to monitor significant structures, or impact monitoring. The objectives, benefits and examples of the various use cases are described in the present article. Monitoring results are most useful when they are combined with other information about the structure, such as repair measures or damage development, in a common data environment. The Digital Twin is a possibility to merge the existing information und represents the highest expression of digital implementation. The Digital Shadow with an automatic data link from the physical to the digital object and the manual data link from the digital to the physical object represents a preliminary stage of the Digital Twin. The implementation of a Digital Shadow is already taking place at a demonstrator structure of the BASt. The basis for the Digital Shadow is the parametric BIM model. In a selected BIM application, the available information was compiled for this bridge and visualized in a common data environment.