Structural system identification of pedestrian bridges by observability method

The condition assessment of pedestrian bridges might be overlooked due to the small scale of these structures. A short list of accidents is provided to justify the necessity of condition assessment on pedestrian bridges. In this paper, the structural system identification by observability method is applied in two traditional arrangements of pedestrian bridges. In the simply supported beam example, the symbolical expressions of the estimation for bending stiffnesses are derived first. The validity of the method is justified by the accurate estimations using error-free measurements. However, as the real-life measurements are inevitably polluted by errors, the effect of measurement errors is thoroughly studied according to measurement errors in a particular measurement, loading cases and errors in all measurements. The simulation errors of the method is also demonstrated by a two-span continuous beam. The results show that the loading case is important regarding the accuracy of the estimations