A Novel Framework for Integration of Abstracted Inspection Data and Structural Health Monitoring for Damage Prognosis of Miter Gates

Abstract Operational condition assessments, using a discrete rating system, are frequently used by field engineers to assess inland navigation assets and components. Challenges such as the occasional inability to perform inspections (such as the case with locks watered in an operational state) and protocol requirements requiring ratings even when they aren't inspected lead to highly abstracted inspection data, which are also very prone to human error and misinterpretations due to inspections protocol. On the other hand, some navigational locks are equipped with structural health monitoring (SHM) systems to continuously perform assessments from data obtained in situ. This paper aims to develop a novel hybrid damage prognosis framework for miter gate component of navigational locks, by mitigating effects of human errors on the condition assessment and integrating the highly abstracted inspection data with the SHM. It overcomes two main challenges, namely (1) there is no physical or empirical model available to model the loss-of-contact degradation in the gate, and (2) the mismatches between the inspection data and the SHM system due to data abstraction. A practical case of monitoring loss-of-contact quoin block demonstrates the efficacy of the proposed framework.