🌉 Soul of the Bridge Post 1: Introducing the Soul of the Bridge

Should research come first, or should practice lead?

When we’re responsible for critical infrastructure and must make decisions today, sometimes the only real option is to let practice go first and let research follow. That’s exactly what happened here.

For the past two years, I’ve had one ongoing monitoring project where the goal has been to simply make the best out of what monitoring data we have. The aim is to ensure the safe use of the bridge during its final years in service. Earlier this year, I started another project, where the goal was to understand how a bridge behaves under load in order to support the design of the repair works.

Both of these are suspension bridges from the 1960s. They behave differently from what was originally expected, especially under today’s heavier and more dynamic traffic loads.

During these two years, I’ve experimented quite a bit with how AI can improve data analysis.

Often people believe you just hand all the data to AI and wait for the analysis. Nope – the reality is much different. You just give the structure of the data to AI and work together to create a code that will later crunch the data (usually without any AI involvement). The difficult part is to validate that the code does exactly what you want – at least for a noob-coder like me.

💡 The biggest benefit, though, is that with this kind of support, you can try out different visualisations much more efficiently. The use of data becomes faster and more focused, and you can spot patterns that would be impossible to find manually.

At the same time, I’ve worked to remove the data-flow bottlenecks with the monitoring companies: Koherent, Mitta and Savcor. Now the data flows smoothly, and it’s much easier to test ideas and develop new analysis tools without unnecessary delays.

And I think that through all of this, we’ve made at least a slight breakthrough in how damage detection can be done. That breakthrough is something I call the Soul of the Bridge method, or SOB-method.

❤️‍🩹 And yes, the Soul is different for every bridge – it is alive, pumping like a heart – and the changes in the Soul will indicate changes. The tricky part is to find the reason for the change.

🧠 In this series of posts, I’ll open up the method step by step, show how it works in real projects, and share some results that might surprise you.