Approaching the assessment of ageing bridge infrastructure

In many of the industrialized countries an increasing amount of infrastructure is ageing. This has become specifically critical to bridges which are a major asset with respect to keeping an economy alive. Life of this infrastructure is scattering but often little quantifiable information is known with respect to its damage condition. This article describes how a damage tolerance approach used in aviation today may even be applied to civil infrastructure in the sense that operational life can be applied in the context of modern life cycle management. This can be applied for steel structures as a complete process where much of the damage accumulation behavior is known and may even be adopted to concrete structures in principle, where much of the missing knowledge in damage accumulation has to be substituted by enhanced inspection. This enhanced and continuous inspection can be achieved through robotic systems in a first approach as well as built in sensors in the sense of structural health monitoring (SHM).