Lively footbridges: overview and perspectives for the development of crowd and structure monitoring systems

摘要

Modern pedestrian bridges are very often lively struetures: this feature is due, on one hand, to the increasing strength of materials and the design trend towards more slender and lightweight structures and, on the other, to the partial reliability of pedestrian dynamic load models and design procedures. Human-induced vibrations reduce the footbridge serviceability and frequently imply high costs for the improvement of the footbridge dynamic behaviour after the construction. Therefore, it is important to define comfort criteria, suitable and predictive load models and practical design rules and to develop monitoring systems to measure the crowd flow and the structural response. The scope of this paper is to provide a brief overview of the state-of-the-art concerning human-induced vibrations on footbridges, with a special focus on international codes and guidelines, addressed to provide a background knowledge to be shared with researchers involved in structural health monitoring and control.