A practical and cost effective BMM system is proposed for periodic monitoring of long-term deterioration and urgent integrity assessment of bridge structures. The system is based on a PC portable FEA and in situ traffic load testing. For this purpose, a powerful yet simple, dynamic FEA Scheme is developed. The scheme exploits high accuracy of the hybrid type FE formulation, and introduces essential improvements over its conventional quadrature based implementations. The hierarchic element generation facility intrinsically automated by the exact integrator-generator modules of the present scheme allows p-method of FE model refinements to ensure convergence of the predictions at a minimal cost. The accuracy and efficiency of the FE scheme are tested against typical benchmark problems, and near exact results are obtained with coarse FE grids. The FE modal analysis of a pilot bridge is performed and the results are validated by the traffic load test measurements for establishing the database. The paper details i) static, ii) dynamic and iii) diagnostic integrity assessment programs of the proposed BMM system, and concludes that these programs can be applied reliably and cost effectively for practical BMM purposes.

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