Development of a Business Intelligence Prototype for Bridge Health Monitoring

This article presents the development of a prototype of a business intelligence system applied to health monitoring of bridge structures in Costa Rica. The final prototype consists of a set of web reports with interactive visualization elements that allow immediate and flexible queries about the condition of national bridges. The queries are based on the definition of a set of strategic indicators related to specific characteristics of bridges including their structural condition, functionality and environmental variables. This information is essential to support decision-making in investment planning processes in the public works sector by central government institutions. The article includes a description of the main tasks performed to develop the prototype including: selection of base platform, extraction and cleaning of data, data modeling, creation of reports and visualizations, and validation. The application of business intelligence techniques in health monitoring of bridges is one of the novel contributions of this work.