Knowledge-Based Systems for the Assessment and Management of Bridge Structures: A Review

It is becoming an important social problem to make maintenance and rehabilitation of existing infrastructures such as bridges, buildings, etc. in the world. The kernel of such structure management is to develop a method of safety assessment on items which include remaining life and load carrying capacity. The purpose of this paper is to summarize the finding of up-to-date research articles concerning the application of knowledge-based systems to assessment and management of structures and to illustrate the potential of such systems in the structural engineering. In here, knowledge-based systems include knowledge-based expert systems incorporation with artificial neural networks, fuzzy reasoning and genetic or immune algorithms. Specifically, two modern bridge management systems (BMS’s) are presented in the paper. The first is a BMS to assess the performance and derive optimal strategies for inspection and maintenance of concrete bridge structures using reliability based and knowledge-based systems. The second is the concrete bridge rating expert system (J-BMS BREX) to evaluate the performance of existing bridges by incorporating with artificial neural networks and fuzzy reasoning.