Multi-Modal Multi-Agent System for Bridge Operation and Maintenance based on Large Language Model
Abstract: Bridges are critical transportation infrastructure, and reliable operation and maintenance (O&M) is essential for traffic safety and long-term structural performance. However, bridge O&M faces key bottlenecks: no unified architecture coordinates heterogeneous resources; model inferences lack clear links to physical-mechanical laws; and experts' tacit knowledge remains difficult to formalize. This study proposes a knowledge-enhanced autonomy formalization methodology and apply it to construct the Bridge O&M Multi-Modal Multi-Agent System (BOMMA), which integrates heterogeneous diagnostic actions, physics-mechanics-informed representations, long-term memory, and structured experiential knowledge within a coordinated multi-agent workflow, enabling interpretable and traceable scheduling, analysis, and decision-making. On 3,492 multi-source instructions, the proposed method achieves scheduling recalls of 85.37% for simple and 99.40% for composite tasks, with 95.35% BERT F1-score for O&M action reasoning. Ablation studies confirm the contributions of the components in the autonomy. This study bridges general LLM reasoning and specialized bridge O&M requirements.