Research On Plug-in Three-dimensional Visualization System For Bridge Health Monitoring

More and more bridges have been built with the rapid development of the socialprogress and communication. In the meantime, the number of aged bridges is still on therise, and the bridge safety issues have become increasingly prominent. Bridge healthmonitoring can effectively guarantee the long-term security of bridge structure. Recently,this subject becomes the hot issues and difficulties in the field of academic andengineering all over the world. One of the problems is that there are a large number ofabstract and complex monitoring data, which brings great troubles to monitoringpersons as a result of hard analysis.In this paper, a plug-in three-dimensional（3D）visualization system for bridgehealth monitoring is designed and developed based on summarizing and studying bridgehealth monitoring and3D visualization technology in world, as well as the features andstructures of plug-in and framework of software system. The system provides intuitiveinquiry, analysis and other friendly basic services for monitoring data.The main contents and innovations in this paper are as follows:(1)By adopting plug-in’ framework in principle, the general design of3Dvisualization system for bridge health monitoring is proposed, and its service level isalso described on the premise of that the system can achieve the requirements ofextendibility, dynamics, and reusability.(2)Considering MVC pattern as a whole, and locally emphasizing on theperformance optimization, the core functions of plug-in system are designed, including:①the secondary development interface, allowing users to extend functions of thesystem;②pure and friendly system interface;③data management;④3D animationinteraction of bridge and preview of monitoring data;⑤Comprehensive report service.(3)After analyzing the types of acquisition data according to our project of bridgehealth monitoring, the database model is designed, and a lightweight and reliabledatabase named SQLite is applied to manage the monitoring database.(4)The realistic3D model of bridge and its scenes are constructed rapidly by using3DS MAX. With inputting the resources about3D animation and static3D imagesexported from the3D model above, this paper gives details the development methodand UML model of3D visualized plug-in.(5)A method for bridge curve crack fitting is proposed based on B-spline optimized by using genetic algorithm. The UML model of a plug-in package algorithm is alsodescribed, which provides the methodological guidance for other plug-in of dataanalysis to develop and the system expansion.(6)Taking Tukan Wujiang River Bridge as an example, this paper configures anddevelops plug-ins of its system and function. The loaded plug-in total can achieveintuitive query and analysis for monitoring data, which verifies characteristics that thesystem is extensible and the internal plugs are both independent and collaborative.To put it briefly, this paper researched on the software architecture of the plug-inthree-dimensional（3D）visualization system for bridge health monitoring, developeddifferent plug-ins integrated into system by using the theories and technologies such assoftware engineering,3D animation, artificial intelligence, and provided new methodsand ideas for bridge health monitoring in order to realize flexible configuration,dynamic loading, simple deployment, convenient and highly reuse expansion.