Recent Advances in Researches on Vehicle Scanning Method for Bridges

The vehicle scanning method (VSM), an indirect approach for bridge measurement, has attracted intensive attention since it was proposed by Yang and co-workers in 2004. This method is featured by the fact that no vibration sensors need to be mounted on the bridge, but only one or few vibration sensors are required on the test vehicle. Such an idea has been verified by the field tests, and then quickly extended to construction of mode shapes, identification of damping ratios, and detection of damages for bridges, among others. Compared with the conventional direct method that relies fully on the vibration responses recorded by sensors equipped on the bridge, the advantage of the indirect method is obvious: mobility, economy, and efficiency. Over the years, a rapidly growing number of research works have been conducted along the lines of the VSM for bridge measurement. Particularly, extensive lab experiments and field tests have been carried out worldwide to implement the VSM, resulting in numerous new findings. Moreover, while the technique is still flourishing, it is nourished by inclusion of modern devices such as smartphones, vehicular networks, and cloud. In 2018, a review paper was compiled by two of the authors. To reflect the recent rapid growth of research in this area since then, there exists a need to make an expansion to include the huge number of newly published papers (274 papers in total). As an extension of the 2018 paper, this paper represents a state-of-the-art review of the related researches conducted worldwide. Comments and recommendations will be made at proper places, while concluding remarks including future research directions will be presented at the end of the paper.