Health Condition Evaluation of Cable-Stayed Bridge Driven by Dissimilarity Measures of Grouped Cable Forces

Abstract

An index system for the health-status evaluation of cable-stayed bridges is presented based on a set of dissimilarity measures (DMs) of the cable force of grouped cables. The DMs and their labels corresponding to health status derived by the serviceability limit states of a bridge are determined by the combination of the finite element method and the influence matrix method. The Monte-Carlo method is used to determine the rational values of thresholds of proposed DMs. By comparing the indices with the thresholds, the holistic health status assessment of a cable-stayed bridge can be easily and reasonably determined. Based on eight years of historical data on the cable forces investigated from a real cable-stayed bridge, the proposed methods are applied to evaluate the health status of this cable-stayed bridge. The results show the validity of the proposed methods.