Abstract: A bridge condition assessment method based on hierarchical evidence reasoning framework was proposed to help understand the overall technical condition of cable-stayed bridges． Firstly，the index system of cable-stayed bridge was divided into three levels． The first level is the bridge overall condition，the second level is primary，se-condary，tertiary and traffic safety components，and the bottom level is the actual detection index． Then，the under-lying index information was transformed into evidence，and the reliability of index evidence considered the impor-tance of bridge elements and the reliability of collected data． Afterwards，the Dempster-Shafer combination rule was fused to convey the accidental and cognitive uncertainty in the whole model，and the primary，secondary，tertiary and traffic safety component indicators as well as the overall state indicators of the bridge were obtained． Finally，the rationality of the proposed evidential reasoning framework was validated by a single-tower cable-stayed bridge．The results show that: the combination based on Dempster-Shafer rule loses less data in the normalization process thus more applicable; the index reliability coefficient corrects the subjective judgment error in bridge evaluation，making the evaluation result more conservative and objective; the established bridge evaluation method can provide
more accurate and detailed status of bridge sub-components，and can also be used for bridge group status ranking．

Key words: bridge engineering, cable-stayed bridge, condition assessment, evidence reasoning, combination rule, reliability