🌉 Soul of the Bridge Post 4: Real-World Use Cases of the SOB Method

The Soul Of the Bridge (SOB) method isn’t just a fancy way to visualise how a bridge moves — it’s a glimpse into what structural monitoring could look like in the near future. It’s a practical vision for real-world decision-making, even if we’re not quite there yet.

So… what could we do with a mapped soul of a bridge?

🧱 1. Extend the service life with confidence

By keeping an eye on how the soul behaves over time, we can ensure that the bridge’s response stays within an acceptable range.

If the soul starts shifting in the wrong direction, we can restrict traffic before things get out of hand: a simple measure, huge impact.

⚠️ 2. Before–and–after comparisons after extreme events

If we have a “baseline soul” from normal conditions, we can immediately check for changes after floods, earthquakes, landslides, ship impacts, or sabotage/airstrike.

No need to guess — if the soul stays the same, the structure probably did too, helping us answer one important question.”

🛑 3. Real-time traffic control and overload detection

We can set up a simple counter: how many times has a certain abnormal response occurred today?

If too many “heavy hits” happen, it’s time to act, long before visible damage.

🏗️ 4. Make sure nearby construction doesn’t affect the bridge

Blasting, piling, or excavation nearby can introduce subtle shifts in structural behaviour.

With SOB, we can detect the changes in the response pattern and at least get the first metric right.

🧠 5. Peace of mind for owners and operators

Operators can say: “We see the soul of the bridge every day — and it’s stable.”

That’s powerful. It transforms structural monitoring from a black box into a shared understanding, thereby increasing public trust in the management of critical infrastructures.

📸 6. Confidence in signature structures from Day 1

It’s not practical to monitor every single bridge, at least not yet. But for signature bridges, the kind of CC3+ structures where we push the boundaries of design, it might be wise to monitor from the very beginning.

If you’re doing something extraordinary, it wouldn’t hurt to know that the behaviour matches what the design promised.

🌉 7. Not just bridges…

This method works for any structure facing large, repeated loads:

• Offshore platforms

• Windmills/Tall towers exposed to wind

• Crane runways under heavy rolling loads

• etc

🛡️ Disclaimer: The progress is rapid, and we (as a profession) need to proceed with care. However, with the best domain experts (not the data-guys but real-world bridge experts) we will find the best candidates for the metrics to detect the changes, and eventually locate the damages as well. In the end, it’s only a matter of resources: if we put in the effort (with the same rigour as some other AI projects), we’ll inevitably get there. All this will probably happen earlier than we think.