Modeling the Quantitative Assessment of the Condition of Bridge Components Made of Reinforced Concrete Using ANN

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Please highlight the main contribution of the presented study in the abstract.

Please state the main procedures that are performed in the abstract.

Please add a brief summary of the latest conducted research studies aligned with your work.

It is recommended to enhance the introduction using the available studies in the past five years.

Please include a summary of rubber and recycled materials in bridge structures using the article titled Physical modeling of the long-term behavior of integral abutment bridge backfill reinforced with tire- rubber.

Please further elaborate on the principles of using ANN in the introduction and methodology by referring to the work titled  Predicting the Compressive Strength of Concrete Containing Binary Supplementary Cementitious Material Using Machine Learning Approach.

Please offer a discussion on the basis that ANN is the preferred method in this work. Accordingly, please identify the main parameters that can considerably affect the outcome of your work.

Please add a discussion on the effect of hidden layers on the accuracy of this research.

Please include a better quality of Figure 4 for more clarification.

Please further explain the “  condition assessment criteria” in Table 5.

Please state the outliers’ effect and explain the verification procedure of the offered methodology.

Please revise the conclusion and further highlight the key findings of your work following a quantitative approach

Author Response

Dear Reviewer, 
We thank you for careful reading, and constructive suggestions for our manuscript. We tried to take into account all your comments and suggestions.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

There are several suggestions as below:

1. Artificial neural network method has been widely used in engineering evaluation, and the combined application of this method and other methods are also studied. The authors should clarify which theory of these methods is already existing and which is the new research contents in bridge status assessment.

2. The content of the paper is clear and detailed. However, the introduction and other parts should be concised as far as possible.

3. It is suggested that the structure of the paper should be adjusted, for example, the research status should be put into the introduction, and the contents of the chapter 2, 3, 4 should be written successively according to the bridge condition assessment process.

4. The establishment of training and verification dataset is an important part of the artificial neural network method. How to ensure the rationality of training data and verification data is crucial? How to ensure the correctness of relevant data should be explained.

5. As mentioned previously “The bridge is considered as a system of seven groups of structural components: superstructure, piers, foundations, scaffold, roadway, approaches, regulatory structures.” However, only five classification tables were used in chapter 3.1, please explain it.

6. The results of bridge condition assessment have certain guiding significance for the later maintenance and repair. Specific maintenance and repair plans should be proposed according the assessment result. If possible, the evaluation result after repair can be provided for comparative analysis.

7. The input variables of the other four CTs should be listed in order to determine whether the input variables are reasonable.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer, 
We thank you for careful reading, and constructive suggestions for our manuscript. We tried to take into account all your comments and suggestions.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

N/A

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper can be accepted after revision.