This Special Session is dedicated to T.Y. Lin's hundredth birthday.

SESSION PANEL

Chuck Seim, Consulting Bridge Engineer, El Cerrito, CA, USA
The legacy of T.Y. Lin, his vision of bridge engineering

Jiri Straski, Brno University of Technology, Brno, Czech Republic
Power of Prestressing

Marwan Nader, T.Y. Lin International, San Francisco, CA, USA
Design of the San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge

Man-Chung Tang, T.Y. Lin International, San Francisco, CA, USA
Conceptualization of a bridge across the Taiwan Strait
 

The catastrophic collapse of the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis in 2007, caused by the buckling of an undersized gusset plate, has renewed interest in such connections. In the United States, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) has issued load rating guidance for gusset plates on existing bridges and is performing a series of full scale tests to refine these guidelines. Other research institutions and universities are also active in this area, because steel beam/girder bridges and steel truss bridges account for 40% of the total bridge failures in the US in the last 200 years (Mohan and Sharma, TRB, 2011). This special session will present recent results and ongoing work on experiments, computation, load rating, classification, and structural monitoring of gusset plates used in steel truss bridges.

The session will draw on the expertise available from 14 PhD researchers from the TEAM project investigating various aspects of infrastructure management. This will address many of the key challenges for European transport infrastructure by exploiting the benefits of new sensor and processing technologies, methodologies, models and algorithms to monitor the condition and safety of transport infrastructure. Knowing exactly the state of health of transport infrastructure assets will extend their safe working lives and reduce costs and prevent premature and sub-optimal repair and rehabilitation without compromising safety. This session will also include an overview of the benefits of an integrated European investigation into this key topic.

Nowadays, because of changes in the design codes, increased traffic loads, improper design or construction, damage caused by environmental factors or seismic events, few of the existing bridges meet the current standard requirements. Therefore, to define effective retrofit strategies, the majority of existing bridge structures need a systematic examination of localized damage and the characterization of possible failure modes under ordinary loads and eventually seismic loads. In the practice of structural rehabilitation/strengthening, fiber reinforced polymer (FRP) sheets are becoming increasingly popular materials, particularly in strengthening interventions on RC bridges in relation to flexural and shear strengthening of beams and confinement of piers. The main advantages of these materials, as compared with traditional material properties, are their low self weight and their resistance to corrosion. These advantages make FRP composites very attractive for interventions on bridges. Structural behaviour of FRP strengthened elements has been widely studied over the last few decades and some studies have resulted in the first design guidelines. Nevertheless a number of research issues are still open. In addition to new developments regarding specific issues on FRP strengthening technique, contributions dealing with practical applications on bridges will be included in this special session.

Energy Harvesting, i.e. the process of extracting energy from the environment or from a surrounding system and converting it to useable electrical energy, is a prominent research topic, with several promising applications in bridges and transportation infrastructures. Its areas of application are currently focused - though not limited - to powering small autonomous wireless sensors (thus eliminating the need for wires), while more recently proposals have been made concerning higher power energy harvesting devices, in the upward trend of renewable energy growth. In the latter case, the main objective is to supply power to auxiliary systems (e.g. road lights or information panels), thus satisfying the requirement for sustainable infrastructures. This session will review the recent trends and developments, both for Low- and High-Energy Harvesting, focusing on the research on energy harvesting, transformation, storage and utilization. Topics to be presented include innovative materials, devices and methods, as well as, the state-of-the-art, conceptual designs and practical applications.

Even if recent efforts in developing methodology and measures for design of structures against fire and explosion have been mostly focused on buildings, bridges can also be very sensitive to those actions, as witnesses by some examples of bridge accidents (e.g. Rio Antirio, I-95 overpass, Arhur Maze...), where major economic losses had to be sustained and also the integrity of the structure and the life safety of people has been endangered in few cases.
Purpose of this session is making a focus on the state of the art of the research and the current design practice concerning measure to reduce the vulnerability of bridges to accidental events, with particular reference to the case of fire and explosion. Other accidental events such as impact or ship collision could be also of interest for this session, due to the similarity in the design procedure and investigations to be performed. The topic is not limited to the structural effects of accidental events only, but considerations on the life safety are also of interest for the session, as well as on the costs due to inoperability and repairs of bridges and viaducts.

The City of Chongqing is building a light rail system of about 800 km in total length. The rail lines must cross the two major rivers in the metropolitan area, Yangtze River and Jialing River at several locations, so a large number of light rail bridges are required. This session will include 5 papers on the design and construction of some of these bridges. The individual topics are as follows:

1. Overview of light rail bridges in Chongqing
2. Caiyuanba Bridge – double level dual purpose arch bridge with steel truss girder
3. Chaotianmen Bridge – double level dual purpose arch bridge with steel truss girder
4. Dongshuimen Bridge – double level dual purpose cable-stayed bridge with steel truss girder
5. Qianximen Bridge – double level dual purpose cable-stayed bridge with steel truss girder

Maintenance, rehabilitation and replacement of bridge decks represent the largest expenditure in the overall management of bridges. Therefore, providing means for rapid, nondestructive and accurate condition assessment and performance monitoring could make a tremendous difference in the financial resources spent for their renewal and frequency and duration of traffic interruptions. The primary objective of the proposed session is to address advances in research and development of technologies for evaluation and monitoring of bridge decks. These may include: 1) development of new NDE technologies, 2) advances in air-coupled testing for rapid assessment, complementary use of NDE technologies, 3) NDE data integration and fusion, and 4) other advances related to bridge deck condition assessment.

Bridges for High-Speed Railways involves very specific problems where the structural elements are of great relevance. The main scope of this thematic session is to present advanced knowledge in several topics on this subject, considered most relevant to the design, maintenance and safety of this type of structures, and share the most innovative and interesting experiences on this field.

The artificial intelligence is the branch of computer science concerned with making computers behave like humans. The term artificial intelligence was coined in 1956 by John McCarthy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Today the artificial intelligence methods are applied with profit in varied fields: game playing, speech recognition, understanding the natural language, computer vision, expert systems, heuristic classification, etc.
In bridge design, artificial intelligence methods (evolutionary algorithms, fuzzy methodologies, neural networks, etc.) can be suitable to deal problems which an exact solution does not exist, or it is hard to obtain. Therefore, problems like: structural optimization, handling of uncertainties, reliability, structural identification, management, deterioration, maintenance and other important problems can be effectively formulated with an artificial intelligence approach.
The Special Session proposed will provide a forum for the presentation of recent developments in the use of artificial intelligence methods in bridge structures analysis and design.

Bridges are of essential importance in the worldwide infrastructure network - not only from an economic point of view. Therefore the request for sustainable bridge structures is urgent, especially in view of a 100 years planned lifetime. A holistic approach to assess bridges is however not yet developed. Evaluation criteria, such as lifecycle performance, economic and ecological impacts and interaction with surrounding environment need to be looked at. Purpose of this session is evaluating recent developments and highlighting essential components of a sustainability assessment system for bridges. Research results in single assessment categories as well as proposals for sustainable design can be presented.

Durability deterioration has already become one of the major problems that all concrete bridges are facing up to. With the consideration of the long period and low efficiency of experiment method, it is essential to apply the technique of numerical simulation in assessing the durability performance of concrete bridges. All experiences and research related to this topic are welcome to contribute in this session, especially the numerical model of microstructure of concrete, simulation of material deterioration process such as chloride penetration and concrete carbonation, and simulation of steel corrosion process.

In this special session, seven papers on evaluation, assessment, repair and retrofit of fatigue damage in steel highway and railway bridges are presented and discussed. We have a number of steel highway and railway bridge structures especially in urban area in Japan. Some of those structures suffer various types of fatigue damage, but replace of them should be too expensive, and restriction or close of the traffic could be hardly allowed. So, rehabilitation of those structures becomes of great importance.
Speakers are professors and experts on steel bridge structures who are working in universities, expressway company and railway company in Japan and Korea.

The development of engineered timber materials like glue-lam, cross-lam and laminated veneer lumber (LVL) as an alternative to solid timber has greatly improved the viability of structural timber for low-medium road span bridges.
The importance of sustainability driven by climate changes and the environmental impact make these engineered timber materials a more viable solution then steel and concrete. Recent studies proved that if timber is properly treated and combined with other structural materials also durability and hence maintenance are reduced in the life-cycle of the structure.
The aim of the session is to collect recent research investigations and practical applications of timber road bridges. Moreover particular attention will also be given to innovative solutions which minimise the cost of connections through the use of transversal post-tensioning and other techniques which allow to increase the overall performance of the structure. Both serviceability and safety issues will be covered.

In recent years, the concept of resilience has gained attention by recognizing that not all threats or disasters can be averted, but that can be managed through adequate implementation of preventive and reactive actions. Indeed, societies are turning their attention to efforts to enhance the resilience of entire communities against various types of extreme events. Since infrastructure systems are essential to society and are vulnerable to multiple hazards (e.g. wind, hurricanes, flood, earthquakes, terrorism, and deterioration) due to their extended exposure, risk-reduction technologies that consider the synergies among them may reduce the cost of pre-disaster retrofitting and post-disaster repairs.
The scope of this session is to answer the following main question: How can critical infrastructure systems, including bridges, be designed for disaster resilience by reducing risks to multiple hazards and supporting rapid community recovery? Designing resilient infrastructure systems requires interdisciplinary collaborative efforts by engineers and social scientists to formalize the notion of socio-technical resilience. In addition, infrastructure systems should be designed considering their life-cycles including impacts from disasters and urban dynamics. In particular, community resilience analysis of infrastructures requires the capacity to meet demands that may change over the life-cycles of the infrastructure systems (e.g. urban growth, increases in populations, and climate change).
Also, resilient infrastructure systems, with emphasis on bridge systems and road networks, requires considering interdependencies with other systems---understanding and addressing how failures in one infrastructure system lead to failures in another. This information is critical for cities deciding on strategic investments in infrastructure improvements that will have the greatest payoff in terms of community resilience. This session aims to attract academics, researchers, students, post-graduate students and professional engineers dealing with the following advanced topics:
• Probabilistic risk analysis and decision making,
• Resilience of bridges, structures, and infrastructures,
• Multihazards analysis methods,
• Interdependencies across infrastructure systems,
• Vulnerability analysis,
• Efficient stochastic methods in resilience analysis,
• Insurance and risk management issues.

A life-cycle oriented design philosophy plays a central role both in the design of new bridges and in the assessment and rehabilitation of existing bridges. The structural elements of both steel and concrete bridges, including the piers, deck, and bearings, are often directly exposed to the environment without any protection and a proper design taking into account materials deterioration needs to be envisaged. Even though durability design criteria have been incorporated in new generations of design codes, there is a strong need to investigate how the lifetime structural performance of bridges is affected by the interaction of corrosion and other hazards, such as earthquakes, fires, winds, floods, scour, among others. The aim of this special session is to collect recent research advances, as well as results of numerical and experimental investigations, in the field of life-cycle design and assessment of bridges under multiple hazards.

Technological innovations have been slow to be adopted in engineering design of standard bridges, but have been often utilized in signature bridges such as long-span bridges. While the adoption of advanced materials and innovative ideas in long-span bridges has been noteworthy, the overall impact on bridge engineering practice has been limited because long-span bridges constitute only a small fraction of total bridge population. To transform design and construction of standard bridges researchers are attempting to develop practical application of advanced technologies and progressive engineers are beginning to embrace promising unconventional concepts with better materials and technologies. The focus of this session is on attempts by both researchers and engineers. The speakers will consist of researchers and practitioners who will present recent advances in development and implementation of novel details and materials with substantially improved performance compared to conventional methods.

Long span bridges present architectural design and are used as a signature artifact for the local area. The advancements in bridge technology and the associated software have encouraged the designers to meet record-breaking challenges throughout the world. This 'Special Session' will present various exotic bridge structures designed using innovative modeling software tools.

Performance-Based Design (PBD) is a modern and efficient framework to conceive and assess complex structural systems, which allow designers to consistently take into account both natural and man-made hazards. PBD has been originally introduced for nuclear power plants, and has been later formalized and specialized for earthquake engineering applications. Extensions to other design situations, like blast, fire, and wind scenarios, have been recently proposed.
PBD is particularly important for a reliable design of bridges. As a matter of fact, these structures play a critical role in the aftermath of natural disasters, and therefore their level of structural safety must be rigorously evaluated. Moreover, design philosophies for different hazards lead very often to opposites strategies for bridge structures (e.g. to reduce or increase the flexibility and/or the redundancy). PBD is usually carried out by taking into account each single threat individually (e.g. seismic, aeolian, blast and fire actions), therefore neglecting complex scenarios with simultaneous hazards. In recent years, however, researchers and practitioners have paid an increasing attention to approaches enabling simultaneous exposures for the design of structures. Nevertheless, some difficulties arise in joining the level of knowledge reached in different fields into a unified framework of risk assessment. Furthermore, interactions between different hazards are intrinsically difficult to model, both for lack of raw data and unavailability of concurrent hazards models. A third issue is represented by the necessity of considering uniform hazard levels for the different involved threats. Finally, since a more rigorous design approach is pursued, improved strategies of modeling and analyses should be adopted. This is the case, for instance, of the bridge-vehicle dynamic interaction in presence of seismic or wind actions.
This special session will focus on applications and new developments of PBD of bridge structures under multiple hazards. The aim is to provide an overview of state-of-the-art, theoretical advances and case studies, and to identify ways for further developments. Contributions addressing specific issues in modeling and analysis of bridges subjected to complex loading conditions are also welcome.

The Finnish Transport Agency has a totally new organisation. Instead of the former Road Administration, Railway Administration and Maritime Administration all these three agencies have been merged to one Transport Agency. This has brought a new responsibility of examining and managing the engineering structures. The Bridge Management System of the former Road Administration will be renewed to cover all the engineering structures of the Transport Agency instead of only road bridges. The maintenance and management policy for road and railway bridges, movable bridges and water passage structures, tunnels, piers and quays must be harmonized. This creates even more projects starting from piers' and quays' and tunnel inspection rules, life cycle management and cost calculations, management target setting etc.
Even if the special session covers but projects of the Finnish Transport Agency, it has a diversified contents of new methods and approaches to not only bridges but also other engineering structures concerning inspection, life cycle costs and assesment, management system, multi-objective optimisation and even a nordic co-operation project of new bridges' life cycle plannig.

Among the complex and interrelated aspects involved in the field of design and maintenance of bridges and infrastructure systems, those associated with hydraulic problems are of great concerns. Examples are: the analysis of peculiar flow conditions induced by submerged structures (e.g. piers, abutment, pipes, groynes etc.); the induced structural loads and bed scouring; the effects of obstacles (e.g. bridges, embankments etc.) on flood propagation.
A multidisciplinary approach is needed for solving these problems and for obtaining suitable levels of efficiency, service, reliability and security, especially under critical conditions.
Furthermore the development of innovative numerical approaches (e.g. meshfree particle methods) and their coupling with traditional techniques (e.g. finite element) is desirable in order to simulate multi-physical phenomena.
In this context the main aims of the proposed special session are: to gather researchers dealing with various hydraulic problems related to bridges and infrastructure systems; to foster ideas exchange on modeling approaches, design solutions and management strategies.

Due to significant investment involved in building Major Landmark Bridges there is a strong focus on preservation of the asset, i.e. minimizing impact on bridge users, initial capital costs of repairs and long term maintenance costs. Operation and Maintenance (O&M) of Major Landmark Bridges must be optimized to control availability to traffic, costs, safety, impact on the environment and aesthetics.
This special session focus on advancements and knowledge sharing within O&M of various major bridges in terms of assessment, direct measurements in order to predict load and load distributions, design for effective maintenance, inspection and maintenance planning.

Health monitoring of civil infrastructure systems has emerged as a promising effective integrated management tool. The use of health monitoring systems for bridges, integrating sensors and instrumentation, communication and computation together with data and information management, hasn't ceased increasing over the last few years. One major objective is to develop new concepts and methodologies for smart development and integration of structural health monitoring when considering bridge health monitoring.
The goal of this special session is to provide a forum for the presentation of recent developments in the use of structural health monitoring applied to bridges in the realm of the next generation's intelligent transportation systems for the detection of structural modifications under environmental conditions.

Bridge Inspection requires robustness and durability in measurement systems and devices under severe environmental condition. There are numerous multi-scale monitoring techniques that range from micro-scale to macro-scale such as Electronic Speckle Pattern Interferometry (ESPI), Digital Image Correlation (DIC), and Laser Doppler Velocity Meter (LDVM). These newly developed optical monitoring techniques have tremendous features in high accuracy, high resolution, contactless, full-field and severe-environment-proof in their monitoring capability. This session's scope is ranging from technological barriers to possibilities of creating new business in monitoring structural deformation, strain, stress and structural dynamic properties by utilizing innovative optical monitoring techniques to provide appropriate structural information for bridge maintenance and safety.

The scope of this session is to present the progress of recent works made in Mexico regarding the safety and maintenance of bridges under heavy vehicle and/or seismic loading. New concepts as: intelligent monitoring, hysteretic dissipating devices and GIS technology, among others, are incorporated into the design of strategies to optimize expenditures on safety and maintenance. Problems to be addressed:

1. The use of information coming from intelligent monitoring to improve the bridge modeling, to reduce uncertainty on the capacity prediction and to carefully assess the bridge safety.
2. The treatment of substructure irregularities on bridges under seismic loading.
3. The use of GIS technology for Mexico road network
4. The problem of bridge scour
5. The use of life-cycle functions to promote bridge safety and sustainability.

In recent years more and more demanding infrastructures are designed, built and operated to satisfy the increasing needs of the Society. These constructions require high level performance and they should be designed taking into account their durability during their life cycle and their behavior in accidental situations. The theoretical framework for their design and assessment should be based on a comprehensive evaluation of the overall performance considering their evolution in time.
All these requirements are in contrast with the simplified formulation for design and assessment that are still widely applied. The safety and reliability of these constructions should be considered through modern non deterministic schemes of analysis and simulation, as suggested in various codes and guidelines for bridges.
The proposal of this session is to discuss the recent advances in the application of non deterministic approaches for both design and assessment of bridges, including safety and performance evaluation, identification, structural monitoring and control during the service life. Some of the innovative approaches are based on soft computing techniques, others on probabilistic framed algorithms.

Bridges play a fundamental role in social growth and economic transformation, becoming themselves strategic structures. Their protection against external hazards is essential.
Structural Control can offer useful solutions for such structures and offers, at the same time, a means to act on existing bridges in need of remedy under every-day loads, or of a performance improvement in view of changed code or environmental requirements. The former aspect is becoming increasingly frequent, nowadays, for slender footbridges. Indeed, the different Structural Control approaches have been shown able to deal both with extreme events, e.g. hurricanes or earthquakes, but also with actions characterized by relatively low intensity and high probability. For the first class of actions, they can give an important contribution to the structural stability and safety in general, for the second one they allow to extend the expected life (e.g. reducing fatigue in welded connection of the metallic elements), reduce maintenance, or to improve the comfort by mitigating the vibration perception (e.g. pedestrian induced vibration).
This session is devoted to the exchange of design experiences and to the discussion of research achievements related to the Structural Control of bridges and footbridges. Results pertaining to all the different control strategies are appreciated.

A relevant part of the bridge maintenance costs do not concern the bridge structure itself, but the auxiliary and finishing elements. In a typical maintenance plan, the first elements to be reconditioned or substituted are the movable joints among decks or between decks and abutments, the bearing supports, the ducts of the drainage system, the pavements. Moreover, the wrong functioning of these items increases the dynamic effects, due to irregularities of the road platform, and the provokes several types of local damages in the structural elements. Hence, the traditional solutions have significant drawbacks with regard to serviceability and durability and markedly reduce the ride comfort.
Many administrations push to design bridges which, due their intrinsic characteristics, avoid these problems. A general, even if imprecise, definition of this type of bridges call them "Integral Bridges".
This type of bridge was experienced since many decades mainly in the U.S. According to its typical configuration, an integral bridge is short span bridge (15 - 30 m), shaped as a portal frame and having the deck continuous with the abutments. No expansion joints, nor traditional bearing supports are required and any relative displacement or rotation among more rigid and more flexural parts is avoided. Usually this kind of configuration solves only in part the whole problem, because the soil consolidation behind the abutments and the seasonal thermal cycles induces other type of deformations, which may strongly influence both the structure and the pavement continuity, causing, in same cases, cracks or bubbles.
Aim of this Special Session is the stir contributions on the last studies concerning the integral bridges, with particular focus on: soil structure interaction at the abutments, thermal effects, pavement protection and applicability of the integral bridge concept in the field of medium span bridges. Theoretical, computational and practical proposals are expected. Any new contribution in this field will be surely of common and diffused interest for road/railways administrations, for building firms and for construction systems manufactures.

This session will focus on the maintenance and preservation of long span geriatric bridges. With the world's bridge inventory getting increasingly older, we have assembled a group of speakers that will outline the research and technology methodologies that have been developed and implemented on long span bridges. This technology has proven to be useful in providing bridge owners valuable information needed to make sound financial decisions in the management of their assets. The session will include representatives that include the asset owner, financial managers, academicians and engineers all working together to maintain historically significant geriatric bridges with the goal of long term preservation.

More and more bridges throughout the world are constructed on curved or skewed alignments or a combination of curved and skewed alignments. Unique geometries that result provide for structural response that differs considerably from what occurs for a bridge that contains straight members and has substructure elements that are aligned orthogonally to the superstructure. This session will summarize research work in the U.S. that has examined the response both steel and concrete bridges that are not straight.

In less than six months the city of Christchurch, New Zealand experienced two major earthquakes on September 4, 2010 and February 22, 2011; the former was generated by rupture of the previously unknown Greendale fault releasing a magnitude 7.1 earthquake at 30-40km away from the city; the latter event (magnitude 6.3) was less than 10km from the Central Business District on a buried fault. The different nature and location of the two events generated different and widespread damage to the lifelines covering not only Christchurch city but also the closest districts. Teams from varying organisations performed inspections on over 800 bridges over the affected Canterbury region. Overall bridges performed well, with only 20 bridges requiring closure due to damage caused by the two earthquakes, and a maximum length of time of closure of approximately two weeks. However, interesting phenomena mainly related to soil structure interaction emerged from the preliminary inspections. The aim of this special session is therefore to give a detailed overview of the seismic performance of New Zealand bridges during these two earthquakes and indicate some of the shortcomings of the current design code. The special session intends to comprise reconnaissance reports of both earthquakes and analysis and testing on special case studies.

Hidden corrosion in prestressing cables of concrete bridges can lead to catastrophic failures. In order to avoid such failures, it is essential to be able to detect and estimate the magnitude of steel corrosion before it reaches a critical state. Research and development over the last several years have shown significant progress and promise for the use of magnetic-based methods to detect steel corrosion in various bridge structures with a good degree of reliability. The scope of this session is to disseminate the results of the latest research and development for magnetic-based methods for corrosion detection in bridges.

The hybrid composite system simply combines two or more materials to form a single segment of structure. It is especially widely applied into civil structures as it maximizes the advantages of classical construction materials. Hybrid composite system needs a concrete interface which can effectively convey the loads between the materials. Especially, behaviour of hybrid system and its interface which connects the concrete and steel have been widely investigated, because of their potentials for practical application. On this regards, this session has been organized to bring and share the knowledge on the hybrid composite bridge system. Theoretical, computational, and experimental contributions are all welcomed. Especially, efforts and contributions on developing interfaces of hybrid system, behaviour of connections are cordially invited.

Evaluation and measurement of bridge performance is the most critical attribute in addressing bridge deficiencies and in providing the ability to design and build bridges with optimal life cycle costs, higher performance, lower maintenance, and generally optimal operation in the future; however, there are gaps in knowledge due to data uncertainties. Uncertainty in measuring bridge performance is not well defined, understood or documented. It relies too heavily on expert opinion and not on objective data and is based on significant assumption or generalization based on a less than optimal understanding of bridge behavior.
Condition ratings, based on a fixed rating scale (some version of good, fair, poor) and determined during a visual inspection are the most common basis for current evaluations of bridge performance. These ratings are useful, but they are not a sound basis for a clear understanding of bridge performance nor are they useful in evaluating options for improving bridge performance - neither at the component level nor at the structure level. This session will explore the need to integrate nondestructive testing and periodic monitoring and long term monitoring into the inspection process to capture the data necessary to better understand and then enhance long term bridge performance.

Management of ageing transport infrastructure is a common challenge facing network owners/managers & operators internationally, no more so than during times of economic recession. The goal of EU 7th Framework funded 'Long Life Bridges', an Industry Academic Partnership Project (IAPP) is to extend the life of the bridge infrastructure across Europe through the application of the current state of the art in a number of current bridge related research themes. This FP7 funded project involves collaboration between two research driven SMEs; Roughan and O'Donovan Innovative Solutions (RODIS, Ireland) and Phimeca (France), with two leading Universities; The Royal Institute of Technology (KTH - Sweden) and The University of Aalborg (AAU - Denmark). The project brings together experts in the field of structural assessment, probabilistic analysis and risk quantification. Three main threads are investigated: (i) dynamics, (ii) life cycle evaluation and performance optimisation and (iii) fatigue. The aim of the proposed special session is to (i) disseminate the work performed to date as part of this project, (ii) to engage discussion with the participants at the IABMAS 2012 Conference and (iii) in so doing to ensure the research remains relevant and quickly exploitable for infrastructure owners/managers and operators in optimising the performance of their elements/networks over their remaining serviceable lifetimes.