Existing bridges designed without adequate durability level deteriorate severely. To confirm whether these deteriorated bridges still satisfy the safety and serviceability requirements, it is necessary to investigate the effect of the material corrosion on the bridge’s capacity and stiffness. Using inspection results, the epistemic uncertainties associated with the service life reliability prediction of existing bridges can be reduced compared with new bridges.

The aim of this Mini-Symposium is to attract state-of-the-art papers that deal with the use of advanced computational and/or experimental techniques for evaluating the life-cycle performance of existing bridges in an aggressive environment. For these bridges, multiple environmental and mechanical stressors lead to deterioration of structural performance. Such deterioration will reduce their service life and increase the life-cycle cost associated with maintenance actions. This Mini-Symposium covers current theoretical and experimental efforts made in the assessment and future prediction of performance, maintenance and strengthening of existing bridges in an aggressive environment. The following topics would be addressed:

. Life-cycle analysis of existing bridges based on reliability approach
. Updating the reliability of existing bridge by incorporating inspection results
. Long-term deterioration model of bridge performance
. Visual inspection or advanced structural health monitoring techniques
. Related topics with laboratory or field experiments on aging bridges

Loading is the most variable term in the structural reliability problem. Since resistance modelling is fairly well understood, in the assessment of existing bridges in particular, the accurate estimation of loading can obviate or reduce the need for replacement and rehabilitation measures, potentially offering bridge owners (and society) enormous savings. Continuiiung on from the success of this mini-symposium at IABMAS 2014, this mini-symposium will examine all forms of loading for pedestrian, highway, and railway bridges, including, but not limited to, long- and short-span bridges, vehicle and traffic modelling and measurements, dynamics, statistical analysis, earthquakes, pedestrians and non-linear modelling methods. Those involved in the measurement and modelling of loading, both static and dynamic and the calibration of theoretical models, are particularly encouraged to submit their work for presentation in this mini-symposium.

The Central Objective of Bridge Maintenance is the control of the Safety of Existing Bridges.

Their safety depends mostly of the deterioration from one side and from the loading increase on the other side. The deterioration usually came from carbonation and chloride induced corrosion or freeze and thaw attack. Inspection and monitoring, not only of the bridge itself, but also of the traffic on it, are the basis for the design of its rehabilitation, strengthening or enlargement.

With Inspection and Monitoring results on hands, the design should take into account the differences between Existing and New bridges. An old bridge well designed and built demonstrates its qualities through the inspection, showing no important structural problem and no abnormal deterioration after years of good service. In this case, this bridge can support more load than was supposed in its design because many of the required tolerances were far respected. This means that the last version of design codes need not to be applied completely to this case. Unfortunately we do not have an Existing Bridge Code yet.

Examples of rehabilitation, strengthening or enlargement and a discussion of the particularities of the safety of existing bridges are the focus of this mini-symposium. 

Notable events of bridge collapses due to accidental loads, environmental aggressiveness and related phenomena, such as corrosion and fatigue, indicated structural redundancy and robustness as key factors for a rational approach to life-cycle design of deteriorating bridges and infrastructure systems. Structural resilience is also an important indicator in bridge engineering to express the capability of bridge structure and infrastructure systems exposed to extreme events, such as earthquakes, to withstand the load effects and to recover efficiently the original configuration. However, the concepts of redundant, robust and resilient structures, or damage-tolerant structures, are still issues of controversy, since there are no well established and generally accepted criteria for a consistent definition and a quantitative measure of these performance indicators. The aim of this Mini-Symposium is to present advances on this subject and to provide conceptual and analytical design tools that can effectively be implemented in design practice for measuring and evaluating the life-cycle redundancy, robustness and resilience of bridge structures and infrastructures under multiple hazards, with emphasis on the interaction between seismic and environmental hazards in aggressive environments.

In recent years topics such as robustness, resilience, sustainability, life-cycle assessment have shifted into the focus of engineering societies. Many concepts have been developed. Yet, accurate and physically based prediction models and modeling concepts for the time dependent behavior and deterioration of concrete structures, which are quintessential inputs, are still scarce. This Mini Symposium will provide a forum for international experts and researchers to discuss recent developments in modeling time-dependent phenomena relevant to the performance of concrete structures in general, and bridges in particular. Authors working on research related to creep and shrinkage, the age-dependent change of mechanical properties by themselves or in combination with deterioration mechanisms such as but not limited to alkali-silica reaction, carbonization, freeze and thaw, corrosion, and sulphate attack are encouraged to submit abstracts. Further topics of interest include the coupled problems of cracking damage with moisture transport and other transport processes relevant to deteriorating concrete structures.

There is a strong demand for the development and efficient use of novel techniques for monitoring and assessment of bridges. The objective of this Mini-symposium is to highlight the recent developments in the field of monitoring and the reliability assessment of bridges. The mini-symposium covers the following topics:

. Novel techniques associated with long term monitoring of bridges;
. Novel techniques associated with management and maintenance
. Reliability and performance based bridge monitoring;
. Benchmark studies associated with novel technologies related to bridge assessment and monitoring.

Radical developments in telecommunications and sensor technologies are changing the way that civil engineering design and infrastructure maintenance are conceived and carried out. Indeed, within the next years smart structural elements with embedded sensors and systems capable of self-diagnosis are about to became a normal part of bridge construction. The goal of this mini-symposium is to bring together researchers working on innovation in bridge health monitoring including technological and methodological developments. Contributions are invited in the fields of sensors development and deployment, data processing, structural identification, sensor fusion, structural diagnosis and prognosis, including decision problems in bridge monitoring applications.

Since its infancy in the seventies, structural reliability has matured into a well accepted body of knowledge, which is nowadays broadly acknowledged as a mean of quantifying safety in civil engineering infra-structure. This mini-symposium aims at bringing together researchers, academics and practicing engineers to discuss recent advances in structural reliability methods and novel applications to bridge safety analysis and maintenance planning. Contributions addressing both theoretical developments and practical applications, in the following topics, are invited:

1. Recent developments in structural reliability methods;
2. Bridge reliability and safety;
3. Bridge design optimization considering uncertainties;
4. Reliability-based bridge design, inspection and maintenance planning;
5. Life-cycle optimization of bridge inspection and maintenance planning;
6. Surrogate modeling techniques for reliability and optimization analysis;
7. Time-variant reliability analysis of bridges, considering deterioration modeling;

The speakers will present the state-of-the art on the design, maintenance and repair of the greatest Brazilian bridges, focusing particularly in the works developed in the Rio-Niterói Bridge. The high level of the maintenance technology applied in this bridge is nowadays recognized as an international reference in the subject. New studies regarding the protection of this bridge concerning the impact of ships will be also presented. It will be shown as these aspects are important for the safety and operational performance of the bridge, the biggest one of the South Hemisphere.

The efficient and effective movement of freight is extremely important for the Australian economy. Australia already has some of the worlds heaviest legal loads and Road Authorities are regularly being requested to increase load limits and open up more of the network to heavy freight. At the same time funding for maintenance, rehabilitation and strengthening of bridges is declining yearly. This mini-symposium will explore how Australia is meeting the challenge of the increasing task freight and decreasing maintenance budgets by the industry working together to develop technology to manage, assess, rehabilitate and strengthen its bridges.

Brazil is a large country that mainly depends on the road system for transporting goods and people. Much of the federal and state network of roads is composed of structures built during the 60s-70s, which have received little maintenance and are showing significant conservation problems. Given the low redundancy of the network and the increase in heavy traffic, the country is faced with the challenge of rapidly improving and qualifying bridge inspection and intervention or be faced with increased disturbances due to the loss or interdiction of bridge structures. To tackle this problem it is vital to understand current deterioration patterns and identify the most critical intervention needs. The MS proposes to discuss the most challenging deterioration problems, including emerging topics that are attracting attention, such as the role of ASR, the synergy fatigue-corrosion and the control of vibration.

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) of bridge structures during and after construction, as well as over its service life, has recently become more attractive to owners and consulting engineers. With the introduction of new materials and construction methods, various types of concrete structures are being instrumented with monitoring devices to determine their performance as well as their response to various loading conditions. Among many other objectives, this includes monitoring the performance of bridges at the serviceability and durability limit states. Emphasis has been placed on the assessment of cracking potential, rebar debonding, measuring time-dependent deformations such as creep and shrinkage, camber and deflection, evaluation of rebar corrosion, fatigue performance, excessive vibrations, detection and measurement of overloads, validation of new design or construction provisions, and calibration of reliability-based design code provisions.

Considering these issues, the main goal of this Mini-Symposium is to highlight different aspects of SHM where various types of instrumentation techniques used to monitor and test various types of structures during and after construction. It is also intended to help develop guidelines for the evaluation, assessment, and load rating of bridges by incorporating field-testing, structural health monitoring, and probabilistic methods. The Mini-Symposium will include sessions that will provide a platform for researchers from leading countries to discuss and compare various methodologies that were adopted by their respective transportation agencies and to enhance future collaboration on this subject. The current state-of-the-art and technological advances from design to management will be presented and discussed for the short, medium and long-span bridges. Invited researchers and practitioners will present results from their recently completed or ongoing research work and case studies.

Brazilian Outlook and Highways Dealers
About 1.7000.000 km of highways
About 180.000 bridges

Most of them are built in the 60’s.  Since then, live loads were increased dramatically, as well as the extremely polluted environment has contributed to the degradation of structures. The purpose of this MS is present the latest techniques and concepts currently used in the maintenance and strengthening of bridges.

The structural adjustments in existing bridges should always consider the difficulties that these interventions will bring in highway operations, with major disruptions to your users. Moreover, in works of this nature must be considered in most cases that the existing bridge can not be completely interdict.

This mini-symposium is the continuation of a successful mini-symposia conducted in IABMAS 2008 in Seoul, Korea, 2010 in Philadelphia, USA, 2012 Stresa, Italy and 2014 Shanghia, China. Bridge health monitoring (BHM) is typically used to track and evaluate performance, symptoms of operational incidents, anomalies due to deterioration and damage, as well as health during and after extreme events. It is possible to capture seasonal and environmental changes not readily apparent from intermittent tests. Bridge health monitoring, which is a special case of structural health monitoring, can be expected to integrate sensing technologies, analysis methods and information technology for infrastructure management.

There are numerous real-life BHM applications around the world. New advances in sensor and information technologies and the wide use of the Internet make BHM a promising technology for better management of bridges. Large-scale applications have been presented at a number of specialty conferences and workshops. In spite of the recent activity in this area and the successes achieved, this technology is not gaining acceptance by bridge owners and practicing engineers. We need to close the gap between theory and practice. There are many challenges remaining that must be overcome for successful BHM applications. As a result, there is still a lot of research to be conducted and then demonstrated before routine applications of BHM can be expected to take place.

This mini-symposium if focusing particularly on the research needs for BHM systems and benchmark studies, and integration of BHM analysis methods for decision-making. The mini-symposium covers the following topics and other related topics in the broad area of “Research and Application for Bridge health Monitoring.”

. Long term monitoring applications of bridges.
. Management and maintenance oriented monitoring applications – Research in reliability based bridge health monitoring
. Research in local and global monitoring for bridges.
. Benchmark studies for collective research
. Research in novel technologies such as GPS, computer vision, novel materials, new sensing applications

The safety, maintenance and management of bridges have been paid more and more attention in recent years. A lot of novel techniques and methods have been rapidly applied and developed in this field. With the supports from the soft- and hard-ware of computers, the technique of numerical simulation is also under a rapid development, and provides a new support to improve the safety, maintenance and management of bridges. This mini symposium will focus on the technique of the numerical simulation and its development in the related topics of this conference, including the numerical models with bridge loadings, multi-scale modelling method of bridge structures, numerical simulation on the performance evolution of bridges during service life, and digital platform for the maintenance and management of bridges, etc.

Major bridges are critical links of transportation network. Any interruption to service due reasons such hazards or extensive repair with partial or full bridge closure affects people and economy. As a result, major bridges need to be managed such that they are safe at all time, resilient in the case of hazards and also maintained timely and properly. This mini-symposium is expected to be forum to share technological advances that are available and employed for ensuring resilient, safe and well-maintained bridges. Researchers, practitioners and bridge owners are invited to share their experiences and present the state-of-the-art/practice in this important topic.

A significant increase in the number of infrastructure designs have appeared recently in Brazil, with strong demand for services, structural and geotechnical works such as harbors, highways and railways. Bridge construction is always a challenge for engineers and its foundations have several particularities in relation to conventional construction works.

It will be discussed during the event the main aspects of design, execution and control of bridge foundations involving structural and geotechnical aspects. This is a great opportunity to update professionals working in the area of infrastructure (structural, geotechnical, builders).

Demands on Transportation agencies continue to increase. Agencies are typically expected to provide a safe and effective bridge network through efficient use of resources while minimizing lifecycle costs. Additionally, in response to deteriorating structures together with increasing loads and traffic, many bridge owners are now required to quantify and control risk in their bridge asset management planning. Risks include deteriorating bridge elements, natural hazards and other hazards. Increasingly, public agencies are being asked to communicate performance goals and adherence to these performance measures to the public. New research is being conducted into ways to incorporate risk into the decision making, different ways to measure and report performance, and methodologies which include consideration of sustainability in the development of work programs (e.g impact to the public, environment, emissions, etc.)

More than ever there is a need for advanced bridge management system solutions to help agencies deal with these demands. This Mini-Symposium is dedicated to examples of BMS solutions for national, provincial/state, or municipal inventories large and small, that address the management of risk, enable users to set and track performance measures, or involve new or innovative approaches to bridge management. In this Mini-Symposium the following topics are invited:

. Owners sharing experiences implementing BMS to assist with managing the above challenges.
. Novel approaches to risk management and risk based decision making.
. Examples of setting and tracking bridge performance measures.
. New approaches to bridge management including consideration of sustainability.
. Approaches to incorporate resilience to climate change and natural and man-made hazards into routine structural program decision making and life cycle cost analysis.