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Arch bridges are one of the main bridge types in the field of civil engineering. The history of arch bridges can be traced back to before the Christian era. Numerous arch bridges built in history have achieved high prestige in structure and architecture field. Some of them still exists and even are in service. Assessing and maintaining this large amount heritage of ancient masonry arch bridges constitutes still a significant challenge for modern engineers.

In the other hand, arch bridge is still a structural type of large actuality and application to modern construction technologies, though engineers enjoy at today a wide choice of structural type for constructing bridges. Span records of arch bridges are broken continuity, especially in developing China. Innovation structural form and construction methods are presented and encourage engineers to build more daring and elegant arch bridges.

The main aim of the International Conference on Arch Bridges (iCAB) is to bring together researchers, experts, practitioners and other people interested in arch bridges, in order to promote the effective interchange and dissemination of knowledge and information, towards a continuous development in the field. The series conference was started in 1995, held every three years. The history of the conference is as follows:

1995—1st Conference—UK;

1998—2nd Conference—Italy;

2001—3rd Conference—France;

2004—4th Conference—Spain;

2007—5th Conference—Portugal;

2010—6th Conference—China;

2013—7th Conference— Croatia.

The 8^th Conference will be held in 2016 in Poland.

The Permanent Scientific Committee of the International Conference on Arch Bridges (PSC-iCAB) was founded at a special meeting hold on 3 October 2013 during the 7th Conference on Arch Bridges. The By-laws of PSC-iCAB was discussed with the Organizers of the arch bridge conferences before “ARCH 2013”, accepted and finally revised according to attendees’ comments. The administrative work of the PSC-iCAB and its official web-site implementation and updating are carried out by the College of Civil Engineering of Fuzhou University (Fuzhou, China).

"Arch Bridges" is the official web-site of PSC-iCAB, its address is http://www.arch-bridges.cn. The main contents of the web-site are information of conference and other academic communication events on arch bridges, specially the International Conference on Arch Bridges, proceedings of the conference, as well as news, real arch bridges and other information on arch bridges.

This web aims at providing forum to engineers, professors, students and other people interested in arch bridges interchange dissemination of knowledge and information. We hope this web will be an “arch bridge” to colleagues interested in arch bridges to strengthen their connections, by our hard work and your kind help.

To be brief, this web is a bridge, an “arch bridge” for arch bridge.

Welcome to this web.

CHEN Baochun

　　　　　　　　　    　　　　　　　　　    Secretariat of PSC-iCAB

　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　   Oct. 3, 2014