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In Louisiana, 12 percent of the 13,000 bridges that facilitate movement of people, goods and services are load posted. That means they lack the strength to safely carry all legal loads.
In turn, this has an adverse effect on the state and regional economies, as heavy trucks needed for transport are forced to take detours, leading to delays and higher costs. Additionally, poor infrastructure like load-posted bridges can be a deterrent to industries considering an investment in Louisiana and the surrounding region.

Working to address this issue is LSU Civil and Environmental Engineering Assistant Professor Sabarethinam Kameshwar and his students Md Manik Mia and Sai Bandaru. The goal of their current project is to quantify the number of load-posted bridges in Louisiana for the next 50 years by combining machine-learning techniques, physics-based deterioration models, and probabilistic methods. This will allow them to develop a tool that can be used to determine the number of posted bridges in the future and identify key parameters whose values are indicative of load posting.