The value of seismic structural health monitoring for road bridges

In the aftermath of seismic events, the availability of real time Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) information can support the selection of the most efficient emergency management plan. A remaining issue in SHM is to convince owners and operators of infrastructure of what is the “added-value” of SHM and what are its social and economic benefits. The Value of Information (VoI) from Bayesian decision theory has been recently proposed to this aim. In this paper, the general methodology to compute VoI from Seismic SHM (S2HM) is described and a sensitivity analysis is carried out to investigate in which cases the installation of a S2HM provides the higher benefit. Specifically, the sensitivity analysis is carried out considering a range of different structural properties of the bridge and different seismic hazard levels. Results demonstrate that, for the considered decision scenario, the installation of a S2HM system is particularly convenient for relatively weak bridges located in high seismicity areas.