Reliable Dynamic Monitoring of Bridges with Integrated GPS and BeiDou

Abstract

In recent years, global positioning system (GPS) has been widely used for the measurement of deflections of bridges. However, due to multipath and satellite signal obstructions caused by towers, cables, and passing vehicles, the reliability of deformation monitoring with GPS is still a problem. Recent research with respect to multi–global navigation satellite system (multi-GNSS) technology, though, has enhanced satellite visibility and availability for positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) for users. Its benefits involving application in bridge monitoring are still rarely studied. In this paper, we propose a composite strategy where integrated GPS and BeiDou navigation satellite system (BDS) dual-frequency, carrier-phase data processing is carried out to improve the reliability of bridge monitoring with GNSS measurements. In addition, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR)–based stochastic model and postfit residual editing strategies are utilized to enhance the reliability further. In a group of fixed-point experiments, improvements of 2–3% in precision were achieved with the integrated GPS and BDS compared to GPS-only results. Based on the real GPS and BDS measurements collected on the Baishazhou Yangtze River Bridge in China, we assessed the performance of the proposed method. In the vibration experiment, no apparent effects on natural frequency identification were found by introducing BDS into the solution in an ideal observation environment. However, the combined GPS and BDS results seemed to be much more promising, with lower background noise. Meanwhile, the integrated GPS and BDS data processing with postfit residual editing and SNR-based stochastic model strategies effectively managed satellite signal obstruction and the influence of multipath effect to attain reliable dynamic deformation-monitoring information for bridges.