Continuous Bridge Monitoring at the scale of a whole country: the example of Greece

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) services for bridges are usually contracted and designed for one single structure with a specific defect or issue, like cracks, excessive vibrations or deflections, or overloaded traffic control, for example. However, standardized SHM processes are emerging to gather several bridges into one unique remote monitoring system, which enables a “Meta-SHM” with comparative studies between different bridges in the same area, based on the same framework for all of them. This shall lead to infrastructure management based on SHM at the scale of a whole network, instead of a single bridge. Such a process is currently being applied at the scale of a whole country in Greece, involving 250 bridges at once, on both road and railway networks. The standardized SHM setup includes long-basis extensometers (optical strands) and accelerometers, set on similar locations on all the bridges to allow comparisons. It is able to assess the effect of the traffic and of strong environmental events like earthquakes and floodings. The data from all the bridges is gathered in real time on a common web platform, and standardized data analysis processes are carried out, to release simple indicators about the mechanical behaviour of the bridge decks. In addition, bridge-weigh-in-motion (BWIM) gives an insight on each heavy traffic load crossing the bridges. This contribution describes the first steps of the deployment of this large-scale SHM solution by OSMOS in the past year, focusing on the definition of the global framework and on some operational case studies.