The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Mandi has developed an advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) based signal processing technique for accurate prediction of structural health of bridges and other structures in collaboration with French scholar Dr Laurent Mevel working with the Inria Research Center in Rennes University (France ) .”
The researchers say, “The research is quite important as bridges built at various places undergo natural aging due to environmental factors like temperature fluctuations, water exposure compounded by heavy road traffic etc.”
The research is significant as more than 13500 bridges across the country play an important role in India’s infrastructure; the condition of these bridges is assessed by a traditional method, which experts feel is not foolproof, time consuming involving manual analyses.”
Recent advances in instrumentation, data analysis and AI based tools like Deep Learning hold great promise for structural health monitoring of bridges and other structures, making the analysis and determining their life easier, besides renovating these for extending lifespan.
Elaborating on the work, Dr Sen said, “We have employed data-driven methods like machine learning, AI, and Bayesian statistical inference to estimate a bridge’s health and predict its remaining usable life, which has potential to reduce risks to infrastructure under operation and adverse loading conditions.”
IIT Mandi researchers tell, “The AI-based algorithms have broad applications, not limited to bridges alone but can be used for other structures like ropeways, buildings, aerospace structures, transmission towers etc requiring periodic health assessment.”
The finding of this study has been published in the journals – Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing and Neural Computing and Applications jointly by Dr Subhamoy Sen, Associate Professor, School of Civil and Environmental Engineering in association with research scholars Dr Smriti Sharma, Eshwar Kuncham, Neha Aswal from IIT Mandi and Dr Laurent Mevel from France.
