- Pedro Montenegro, Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto
- Munemasa Tokunaga, Railway Technical Research Institute
- Matsuoka Kodai, Railway Technical Research Institute
- Diogo Ribeiro, School of Engineering, Polytechnic of Porto
The railway transport has been playing a critical role in the globalization that is taking place worldwide in the 21st century, especially by contributing to a sustainable development of economies due to the low environmental impact and transportation costs associated to it. Therefore, the investments in this transport are increasing every year throughout the world, both for building new railway lines, as well as for renewing existing ones. Since many of these lines include a significant number of railway bridges, it became critical to enhance the strategies to assess the condition of this type of structures.
This minisymposium aims to bring together researchers from all the word to share their latest achievements in the field of the condition assessment of railway bridges based on numerical investigations. Expected papers will cover various topics related to: railway bridge design, automated structural damage identification, digital twins, Bridge Information Modeling (BrIM), life cycle assessment, Big Data and Artificial Intelligence, augmented and virtual reality, emergency management and intelligent asset management. The scope of the present minisymposium also encompasses the following topics related to bridge dynamics: train bridge interaction, track bridge interaction, train running safety on railway bridges, train riding comfort, reliability and runnability of railway bridges in strong winds and/or earthquake-prone areas, soil structure interaction, transition zones.