A Comparative Assessment of Bridge Deck Wearing Surfaces: Performance, Deterioration, and Maintenance

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors have focused on nine influential variables to unravel the intricate connections among performance, deterioration, and maintenance of six distinct bridge-wearing surfaces: Monolithic Concrete, Gravel, Wood, or Timber, Bituminous, Low Surface Concrete, and Other. Statistical analyses were employed to determine associations between variables and concepts, exploring similarities and differences across various wearing surface types. In particular, machine learning algorithms were utilized to model the maintenance considering the performance and deterioration of the six diverse wearing surfaces. They further applied a well-performing prediction model (which achieved an accuracy of 0.86 and an AUC score of approximately 0.83) to obtain interpretable insights regarding bridge deck surfaces.

In my opinion, the paper is well presented and organized and can be accepted after following minor revisions.

1-      What are the novelties of present study rather than previous ones? Please describe them point by point in the introduction section.

2-      Please present a brief review about the structure of the paper at the end of introduction section.

3-      Please provide more Refs for section 3.2 and cite all tables and subsections with proper Refs.

4-      Please review more papers in the introduction section.

5-      How do the authors prove the validity of their results?

6-      The authors must rewrite the conclusion section by presenting main results.

Author Response

1.  What are the novelties of present study rather than previous ones? Please describe them point by point in the introduction section.
    - Response: In the introduction section, we have highlighted the novelties of this research paper and described them point by point [line 75-92].

2. Please present a brief review about the structure of the paper at the end of introduction section. 
    - Response: At the end of the introduction section, we provide a revised version of brief review about the structure of the paper [line 93-101].

3. Please provide more Refs for section 3.2 and cite all tables and subsections with proper Refs.
    - Response: We now provide a brief overview of the Section Data Processing that includes the Subsections such as data cleaning and data transformation. Each subsections and tables are cited [line 175-183]. We also added a brief description of the table 3 to highlight the distribution of bridges from perspective of categorical variables [line 218-223].
    
4. Please review more papers in the introduction section. 
    - Response:
        - We have revised the introduction section to add a brief description about current methods to understand bridge health highlight the gap in existing literature [line 34-44].
        - We have specifically added references:
            - Nasrollahi et al.[15]
            - Fleischhacker et al.[17]
            - Wettach-Glosser, J et al.[18] 

5.  How do the authors prove the validity of their results?
    - Response: In the discussion section, we now discuss the validity of the results by confirming insights from the raw dataset by visualizing distribution of influential features [line 559-561].
   
6. The authors must rewrite the conclusion section by presenting main results.
    - Response: 
    - Our conclusion now highlights our main results. We have further added future description of the research work as suggested by other reviewer [line 806-838].

Reviewer 2 Report

The article presented for publication in Applied Sciences is a very interesting work on the multi-aspect assessment of bridge deck wearing surfaces, in which the authors propose original measures of performance, deterioration, and maintenance for such surfaces. The results should be considered reliable because they are based on the analysis of an extensive database of bridges in the state of Nebraska (USA). My comments therefore focus mainly on the editing side:

1) Punctuation should be corrected in several places in the text - e.g. there should be a comma in the sentences in lines 73 and 74.

2) In line 244, please refer to equation 3, not equation 2.

3) The sentence in line 284 uses the word “criteria” twice – one time too many.

4) The information in table 4 is not consistent with the information in table 5 – e.g. the scale of condition ratings used is from 1 to 9, and table 5 lacks descriptions for scale 9.

5) Provide verbal descriptions of the bridge condition for tables 4 and 5 that correspond to the NBI (National Bridge Inventory) condition codes from 1 to 9. Readers outside the US may not necessarily know the exact definition of these codes.

6) The description of figure 9 should contain "monolithic concrete" instead of "low slump concrete".

7) In Conclusions, I propose an additional description of your plans in future research. For example, I think it is worth to consider in the future research also selected weather conditions parameters as a variables – e.g. the number of temperature transitions per year through the freezing/thawing temperature of water, days with very high temperatures, total annual snowfall and rainfall etc.

Author Response

1. Punctuation should be corrected in several places in the text - e.g. there should be a comma in the sentences in lines 73 and 74.
    - Response: We have re-written the sentences (previously line 73 and 74) with appropriate punctuations [lines 93-102].  
    
2. In line 244, please refer to equation 3, not equation 2.
    - Response: We have fixed the typo, where in the line 244 the equation not now refers to 3, as opposed to equation 2.

3. The sentence in line 284 uses the word “criteria” twice – one time too many. 
    - Response: We have re-written the sentence in line 284 that describes the Bridge Intervention Matrix to fix the over-usage of the word "criteria".

4. The information in table 4 is not consistent with the information in table 5 – e.g. the scale of condition ratings used is from 1 to 9, and table 5 lacks descriptions for scale 9. 
    - Response: We have corrected table 5 (now table 6), It now contains a description for scale 9. We have also updated table 4 to add 'None' as an intervention type; suggesting, that when bridges do not deteriorate to a lower condition rating there is no intervention.

5. Provide verbal descriptions of the bridge condition for tables 4 and 5 that correspond to the NBI (National Bridge Inventory) condition codes from 1 to 9. Readers outside the US may not necessarily know the exact definition of these codes.
    - Response: Thank you, for pointing out the typo in our Bridge Intervention Matrix described in table 5 (now table 6). We have added additional table 5 that describes the condition code from 1 to 9. And, referenced it in line 320.
    
6. The description of figure 9 should contain "monolithic concrete" instead of "low slump concrete"
    - Response: We have corrected the description of figure 9 that previously mentioned "low slump concrete" instead of "monolithic concrete".

7. In Conclusions, I propose an additional description of your plans in future research. For example, I think it is worth to consider in the future research also selected weather conditions parameters as a variables – e.g. the number of temperature transitions per year through the freezing/thawing temperature of water, days with very high temperatures, total annual snowfall and rainfall etc. 
    - Response: We have revised the conclusion section to add future work. We have also added a brief summary of the main points of our research paper [line 806-838].