**Abstract**

More than a billion structures exist on our planet comprising a million bridges. A number of these infrastructures are near to or have already exceeded their design life and maintaining their health condition is an engineering optimization problem. Besides, these assets are damage-prone during their service life. This is due to the fact that different external loads induced by the environmental effects, overloading, blast loads, wind excitations, floods, earthquakes, and other natural disasters can disturb the serviceability and integrity of these structures. To overcome such bottlenecks, structural health monitoring (SHM) systems have been used to guarantee the safe functioning of structures to make satisfactory decisions on structural maintenance, repair, and rehabilitation. However, conventional SHM approaches such as virtual inspections cannot be used for structural continuous monitoring, real-time and online assessment. Therefore, soft computing techniques can be significantly used to mitigate the aforesaid concerns by handling the qualitative analysis of the complex real world behavior. This chapter aims to introduce the optimized SHM-based soft computing techniques of bridge structures through artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms in order to illustrate the performance of advanced bridge monitoring approaches, which are required to maintain the health condition of infrastructures as well as to protect human lives.

**Keywords:** structural health monitoring, bridge monitoring, optimization, damage assessment, bridge failure, soft computing, artificial intelligence, evolutionary algorithms
