Largest portion of the bridge stock in almost any country and bridge owning organisation consists on ordinary bridges that has short or medium spans and are now deteriorating due to aging, etc. Therefore, it is becoming an important social concern to develop and put to practical use simple and efficient health monitoring systems for existing short and medium span (10-30m) bridges. In this paper, one practical solution to the problem for condition assessment of short and medium span bridges was discussed. A vehicle-based measurements with a public bus as part of a public transit system (called "Bus monitoring system") has been developed to capable of detecting damage that may affect the structural safety of a bridge from long term vibration measurement data collected while the vehicle (bus) crossed the target bridges. This paper systematically describes how the system has been developed. The bus monitoring system aims to detect the transition from the damage acceleration period, in which the structural safety of an aged bridge declines sharply, to the deterioration period by continually monitoring the bridge of interest. To evaluate the practicality of the newly developed bus monitoring system, it has been fieldtested over a period of about four years by using an in-service fixed-route bus operating on a bus route in the city of Ube, Yamaguchi Prefecture, Japan. The verification results thus obtained are also descrived in this paper. This study also evaluates the sensitivity of “characteristic deflection”, which is a bridge (health) condition indicator used by the bus monitoring system, in damage detection. Sensitivity of “characteristic deflection” is verified by introducing artificial damage into a bridge that has ended its service life and is awaiting removal.

This paper describes the methods of performance evaluation and remaining life prediction for an aged reinforced concrete (RC) T-girder bridge via visual inspection data. The Bridge Management System (J-BMS) that was previously developed by the authors, and which is capable of forecasting the deterioration process of existing bridge members, was applied to evaluate the safety indices (soundness score) and re-maining life of the target bridge based on these test results. Using these methods, the remaining life of an aged RC-T girder bridge(SK-bridge) can be quantitatively estimated by applying the bridge rating expert (BREX) system, which is a subsystem of the J-BMS RC version that incorporates with the field inspection data. In this study, visual inspection was carried out on the aged bridge(SKbridge) by professional visual inspectors, during which all variations of the inspection results were evaluated using a five-step question-naire. As a result, it was found that the soundness score (safety index) and remaining life predictions were influenced by the learning (supervised) data selection. Additionally, the predicted remaining lives were verified through concrete core tests extracted from main girders and deck slabs, and cross-section cutting-off girder tests.