For constructing a good maintenance scheme of an existing bridge, it is essential to know traffic loads acting upon it. The development of the weigh-in-motion techniques that give the weights of running trucks without disturbing traffic flow therefore has attracted many researchers. For the sake of simplicity, we employ herein a technique based on the deformation of a bridge, in particular a steel-plate-girder bridge. To this end, the usage of a short simply-supported straight steel bridge is preferred. However, that kind of bridge is not always available. Actually, the highway of our interest does not have steel bridges except a continuous skew steel-plate-girder bridge. Because of this, we conduct running tests with three trucks of known weights very carefully. The present technique then proves to be satisfactory, yielding the weights of running trucks with about 11% error at most. Furthermore, a real-time system is constructed utilizing optical fibers embedded along the highway: the data of heavy trucks are transmitted in real time to a maintenance office about 20km away from the bridge site. The data reveals characteristics of the traffic flow of heavy trucks in the highway.
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