| dc.description.abstract | Taiwan is a mountainous island with many rivers and creeks thus bridges play an important role in transportation. According to Taiwan Bridge Management System (TBMS), there are 28,418 bridges in Taiwan. For these bridges, 31% had been built more than 30 years. Also, most are facing material deterioration and threatened by natural disasters. In addition, Taiwan locates on the Pacific-rim of seismic thus earthquakes occur frequently, and there are often torrential rains brought by typhoons in summer time that cause floods, scouring, and mudflows. These natural disasters are threatens to the bridges.
Bridge inspection is a crucial task in bridge management. To evaluate bridge condition, DER&U, a visual inspection method, is common for regular bridge inspection in Taiwan. However, there are four major problems in current regular bridge inspection: (1) types of bridge components are not defined for inspection for all types of bridge, (2) inspection results cannot represent a bridge’s ability to resist disasters, (3) inspection may not be properly performed thus the results become untrustworthy, and (4) new tools or methods are needed for bridges that are hard to be inspected.
Results of this research are listed as follows: (1) defining special components for different types of bridges for inspection, (2) adjusting automatically the weight for each component used for calculating a condition index of the bridge, (3) establishing a mechanism for fast evaluation of a bridge’s abilities in resisting natural disasters, (4) generating automatically a 3D bridge model for each type of bridge for visualization of deterioration , (5) using bridge inspection application on mobile devices to facilitate regular bridge inspection ,and (6) using unmanned aerial vehicle to facilitate regular bridge inspection. It is believed that these research results can increase the quality of bridge inspection and management in Taiwan. | en_US |