Evaluation of unknown foundations of bridges subjected to scour physically driven artificial neural network approach

Abstract

Missing substructure information has impeded the safety assessment of bridges with unknown foundations, especially for scour-prone bridges. An approach based on artificial neural networks (ANNs) was developed to identify the inherent patterns in the substructure design of bridges with commonly available evidence (e.g., geometric characteristics of superstructures, loading conditions, soil properties, year built, and location) and then to generalize them further to bridges with unknown foundations. The proposed ANN models were trained with information collected for an inventory of bridges with available foundation records located in the Bryan District of the Texas Department of Transportation..