Hollandse Brug's 146-Sensor Network — Rijkswaterstaat's Real-Time Bridge Monitoring for Predictive Maintenance

During the 2016 reinforcement of the Hollandse Brug (the A6 motorway bridge between Muiderberg and Almere), Rijkswaterstaat sought better data on the bridge's real structural behaviour to move maintenance planning from fixed schedules toward condition-based intervention.

To instrument the bridge so that live traffic-load data could be used to model structural behaviour, recalculate remaining service life, and calibrate the bridge as a weigh-in-motion scale.

Rijkswaterstaat and contractor Strukton Systems installed a 146-sensor network (20 temperature sensors, 41 vertical and 50 horizontal strain gauges paired in old and new concrete, and 34 vibration sensors), with additional underside sensors from TU Delft, all feeding a bridge-mounted computer. A five-minute, 100Hz sample (~30,000 observations) was released for external research. The same IoT-based predictive-maintenance approach - SAS Viya analytics, event-stream processing and around 400 dashboards - is applied agency-wide across Rijkswaterstaat's 140,000km road and 4,400km waterway network.

The bridge now functions as a real-time weigh-in-motion scale, feeding remaining-service-life models and condition-based maintenance planning.

No published figures quantify maintenance-cost or downtime savings attributable to the Hollandse Brug system specifically, and available descriptions are self-reported by Rijkswaterstaat, its contractor and its analytics vendor rather than independently audited - a well-documented but evidence-modest example of sensor-driven infrastructure monitoring.