On the use of a passing vehicle for bridge health monitoring

The large number of short-span and medium-span bridges in transportation systems makes it hard to instrument all of them for direct inspection. This issue has resulted in an increased interest in indirect monitoring of these bridges, i.e., monitoring using sensors in a vehicle passing overhead. With indirect monitoring, no sensors or data acquisition system needs to be installed on the bridge. This paper explains the theoretical background of indirect bridge monitoring and reviews the most important advances that have been made recently. Finally there is discussion and recommendations on the most important challenges that remain.