Welcome 
As many state and federal agencies develop a replacement and rehabilitation strategy for the aging infrastructure, this is an opportune time to provide an integrated condition assessment framework that exploits all available data to be included in the initial design and construction or rehabilitation of bridge structures. With advancements in sensor technology, several bridges are constructed with a structural health monitoring system. As these sensor systems are being deployed across the country it makes sense to integrate the collected data through structural model updating, increasing the efficiency of visual inspections, giving the bridge owners and designers unprecedented insight into what happens to the structure during its life.
A barrier to successful model updating using parameter estimation is assessing the structural condition in a meaningful way. There are several requirements to estimate meaningful parameters that truly reflect the physical behavior of the tested structure. It requires a comprehensive plan for collecting quality data using the state-of the-art technology, a mathematical model designed for estimating parameters that are of concern to bridge designers and managers and an in-depth simulated study that will help to understand the behavior of the model updating algorithms in presence of measurement errors and modeling errors. The analytical and experimental components of model updating are under the supervision of two usually separate groups of individuals. The cooperative collaboration of these groups each operating different sides of the same problem is the only way to ensure successful parameter estimation. This proposed research integrates these groups to offer a new dimension to the data traditionally available for model updating, a targeted model development protocol and advances in parameter estimation algorithms including the required validation simulations.