The 10th International Conference on Bridge Maintenance, Safety and Management (IABMAS 2020) was held virtually April 11-18, 2021, drawing 505 participants from 38 countries.
The conference was co-organized by the International Association for Bridge Maintenance and Safety (IABMAS) and IABMAS Japan, and co-chaired by Hiroshi Yokota of Hokkaido University (Japan) and Dan M. Frangopol, president of IABMAS and the inaugural Fazlur R. Khan Endowed Chair of Structural Engineering and Architecture at Lehigh University.
The objective of IABMAS is to promote international cooperation in the fields of bridge maintenance, safety, and management for the purpose of enhancing the welfare of society. It has about 2000 individual and collective members from 73 countries, and 11 National Groups including Australia, Brazil, Chile, China, Italy, Japan, Korea, Portugal, Sri Lanka, Turkey, and the United States.
Previous IABMAS Conferences were held in Barcelona, Spain, July 14–17, 2002; Kyoto, Japan, October 18–22, 2004; Porto, Portugal, July 16–19, 2006; Seoul, Korea, July 13–17, 2008; Philadelphia, USA, July 11–15, 2010; Stresa, Lake Maggiore, Italy; July 8–12, 2012, Shanghai, China; July 7–11, 2014, Foz do Iguacu, Brazil, June 26–30, 2016; and Melbourne, Australia, July 9–13, 2018.
Conference themes of IABMAS 2020 focused on bridge maintenance, safety, management, life-cycle sustainability, and innovations.
Richard Sause, Lehigh’s Joseph T. Stuart Professor of Structural Engineering, gave a keynote lecture on “Rib-to-floor beam connections of orthotropic steel decks for bridge deck replacement applications.” Sause is director of Lehigh’s Advanced Technology for Large Structural Systems (ATLSS) Center and the Institute for Cyber Physical Infrastructure and Energy (I-CPIE).
Mini symposia, special sessions, and general sessions offered during the eight-day virtual conference covered a variety of topics, including advanced bridge design, construction, and maintenance approaches; safety, reliability, and risk evaluation; life-cycle management and sustainability; bridge management systems; service life prediction; structural health monitoring, non-destructive testing and field testing; safety, resilience, robustness, and redundancy; durability enhancement; repair and rehabilitation; fatigue and corrosion; extreme loads; and the application of information/computer technology and artificial intelligence for bridges.
Conference proceedings (561 technical papers, nine keynote lectures, and the T.Y. Lin lecture) have been published by CRC Press/Balkema, Taylor & Francis Group. The set of book of abstracts and USB card with full papers provides both an up-to-date overview of the field of bridge engineering and significant contributions to the process of making more rational decisions on bridge maintenance, safety, management, life-cycle sustainability and innovations of bridges for the purpose of enhancing the welfare of society.
The next IABMAS conference will be held July 11-15, 2022, in Barcelona, Spain.
