Bridge Engineering Center

About the research

This project is a task order under the main Federal Highway Administration (FHWA)-sponsored project, “Infrastructure Research and Technology Deployment Program.”

The U.S. has more than 600,000 bridges, making the distributed load rating and posting processes across the nation a significant effort that does and can benefit from improvements in efficiency. Bridge load rating, posting, and overweight permitting processes evolve due to the regulatory requirements regarding the frequency of inspections and relevant changes to bridges that necessitate re-rating them. These factors include changes to the dead load, strength of members, and any maintenance or rehabilitation work.

As such, States are interested in modifying their procedures to implement technology and improved means and

methods to reduce the time associated with load rating. Being able to load rate bridges efficiently and accurately is a necessity, particularly in the use case of permit load routing.Based on the extensive findings during the information collection processes for this project, frameworks for future

bridge load rating, posting, and overweight permitting were developed to improve productivity, efficiency, and consistency by closing process gaps and through the application of newer technologies. The newer technologies include digital twin concepts; integrating various (new) data; creating, updating, and reusing models; integrating sensing data (bridge, traffic, weigh-in-motion); and better analysis methods.

This work may help develop the state of practice.