Bridges are designed to withstand different types of loads, including dead, live, environmental, and occasional loads during their service period. Moving vehicles are the main source of the applied live load on bridges. The applied load to highway bridges depends on several traffic parameters such as weight of vehicles, axle load, configuration of axles, position of vehicles on the bridge, number of vehicles, direction, and vehicle’s speed. The estimation of traffic loadings on bridges are generally notional and, consequently, can be excessively conservative. Hence, accurate prediction of the in-service performance of a bridge structure is very desirable and great savings can be achieved through the accurate assessment of the applied traffic load in existing bridges. In this paper, a review is conducted on conventional vehicle-based health monitoring methods used for bridges. Vision-based, weigh in motion (WIM), bridge weigh in motion (BWIM), drive-by and vehicle bridge interaction (VBI)-based models are the methods that are generally used in the structural health monitoring (SHM) of bridges. The performance of vehicle-assisted methods is studied and suggestions for future work in this area are addressed, including alleviating the downsides of each approach to disentangle the complexities, and adopting intelligent and autonomous vehicle-assisted methods for health monitoring of bridges.

Structural health monitoring (SHM) is the main contributor of the future’s smart city to deal with the need for safety, lower maintenance costs, and reliable condition assessment of structures. Among the algorithms used for SHM to identify the system parameters of structures, subspace system identification (SSI) is a reliable method in the time-domain that takes advantages of using extended observability matrices. Considerable numbers of studies have specifically concentrated on practical applications of SSI in recent years. To the best of author’s knowledge, no study has been undertaken to review and investigate the application of SSI in the monitoring of civil engineering structures. This paper aims to review studies that have used the SSI algorithm for the damage identification and modal analysis of structures. The fundamental focus is on data-driven and covariance-driven SSI algorithms. In this review, we consider the subspace algorithm to resolve the problem of a real-world application for SHM. With regard to performance, a comparison between SSI and other methods is provided in order to investigate its advantages and disadvantages. The applied methods of SHM in civil engineering structures are categorized into three classes, from simple one-dimensional (1D) to very complex structures, and the detectability of the SSI for different damage scenarios are reported. Finally, the available software incorporating SSI as their system identification technique are investigated.

Vehicle classification (VC) is an underlying approach in an intelligent transportation system and is widely used in various applications like the monitoring of traffic flow, automated parking systems, and security enforcement. The existing VC methods generally have a local nature and can classify the vehicles if the target vehicle passes through fixed sensors, passes through the short-range coverage monitoring area, or a hybrid of these methods. Using global positioning system (GPS) can provide reliable global information regarding kinematic characteristics; however, the methods lack information about the physical parameter of vehicles. Furthermore, in the available studies, smartphone or portable GPS apparatuses are used as the source of the extraction vehicle’s kinematic characteristics, which are not dependable for the tracking and classification of vehicles in real time. To deal with the limitation of the available VC methods, potential global methods to identify physical and kinematic characteristics in real time states are investigated. Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) are networks of intelligent interconnected vehicles that can provide traffic parameters such as type, velocity, direction, and position of each vehicle in a real time manner. In this study, VANETs are introduced for VC and their capabilities, which can be used for the above purpose, are presented from the available literature. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that introduces VANETs for VC purposes. Finally, a comparison is conducted that shows that VANETs outperform the conventional techniques.