Graph-based method for extracting spatial information from semi-formal text to derive 3D bridge and damage models from legacy maintenance data

Automation in Construction, vol. 178, pp. 106418

Abstract

Aging bridges require improved maintenance strategies; however, recent developments often rely on newly collected data to represent the bridge and its condition, hindering their large-scale adoption and thus significant improvements. This paper demonstrates how existing data from legacy bridge management systems (BMS) can be utilized to automatically create object-oriented knowledge graphs and three-dimensional models of bridge structures and their inspection data. It applies a relative spatial reference system to position and link components and damage, generating a bridge maintenance graph from BMS data that supports spatial queries using natural-language-based location terms. This enables the automatic localization of recorded damage through their textual location descriptions. The method successfully processed 90% of 2,348 damages from two use cases with a precision of 0.8 and a recall of 0.97. The approach bridges the gap between the needs of modern information models and legacy data structures, facilitating the widespread implementation of improved maintenance strategies. • Automatic creation of bridge models based on existing Bridge Management System data. • Automatic localization of damage based on natural language location descriptions. • Creates spatial knowledge graphs from bridge maintenance data. • Transforms legacy domain database structures into object-oriented models. • Integration of historical data in modern information management.

Authors 2

1. Anne Göbels corresponding Aachen Chair of Design Computation

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   Chair of Design Computation, RWTH Aachen University, Schinkelstraße 1, Aachen, 52062, Germany

2. Jakob Beetz Aachen Chair of Design Computation

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   Chair of Design Computation, RWTH Aachen University, Schinkelstraße 1, Aachen, 52062, Germany