Deflection Prediction of Highway Bridges Using Wireless Sensor Networks and Enhanced iTransformer Model

As an important part of national transportation infrastructure, the operation status of bridges is directly related to transportation safety and social stability. Structural deflection, which reflects the deformation behavior of bridge systems, serves as a key indicator for identifying stiffness degradation and the progression of localized damage. The accurate modeling and forecasting of deflection are thus essential for effective bridge health monitoring and intelligent maintenance. To address the limitations of traditional methods in handling multi-source data fusion and nonlinear temporal dependencies, this study proposes an enhanced iTransformer-based prediction model, termed LDAiT (LSTM Differential Attention iTransformer), which integrates Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks and a differential attention mechanism for high-fidelity deflection prediction under complex working conditions. Firstly, a multi-source heterogeneous time series dataset is constructed based on wireless sensor network (WSN) technology, enabling the real-time acquisition and fusion of key structural response parameters such as deflection, strain, and temperature across critical bridge sections. Secondly, LDAiT enhances the modeling capability of long-term dependence through the introduction of LSTM and combines with the differential attention mechanism to improve the precision of response to the local dynamic changes in disturbance. Finally, experimental validation is carried out based on the measured data of Xintian Yellow River Bridge, and the results show that LDAiT outperforms the existing mainstream models in the indexes of R2, RMSE, MAE, and MAPE and has good accuracy, stability and generalization ability. The proposed approach offers a novel and effective framework for deflection forecasting in complex bridge systems and holds significant potential for practical deployment in structural health monitoring and intelligent decision-making applications.