Bridge Strength Preservation by Automatic Traffic Density Control: an IoT Application

Abstract

Bridges are expensive and important constituents in the transportation network and any failure associated with it results in a huge loss of money, time and sometimes, lives. Bridges are important structures considering its use and purpose-serving. It may fail due to aging, loading conditions and natural disasters. Every bridge construction specifies a limit of weight of the vehicles that can ride it. However, still there is a very large record of bridge failures due to overloading. The proposed system is a wireless sensor network which monitors the weight of the vehicles on the bridge and provides immediate protection when the failure of the structure is nearly estimated due to excessive load. This design uses embedded sensors (piezoelectric sensors and accelerometers) over the bridge deck and its girder for the continuous governance of the bridge conditions. Data collected from the sensors are sent to a database server connected to the internet (forming an advanced wireless technology called Internet of things (IoT)) to activate traffic control when the limit crosses in order to eliminate high losses which would’ve occurred if the bridge have collapsed.