Abstract: Health diagnosis for concrete dams during long-term operations is significant to the choice of appropriate risk control measures. Based on an analysis of the hidden troubles of concrete dams in China, this paper reviews recent advances in the key theories, methods and technologies for dam health diagnosis, including in-situ monitoring, on-site inspection, mathematical modelling, structural simulation, and model tests. We highlight further studies in the future on data-driven temporal and spatial evolution characteristics of concrete dam safety status, pattern recognition of reliability development, dynamic collaborative evaluation of risk probability, multi-source heterogeneous information fusion decision, and critical early warning threshold formulation. They are extremely essential to construct a comprehensive diagnosis knowledge project with data sharing and information complementing in an all-round way, so as to guarantee long-term safe operations of concrete dams.

Key words: concrete dam, health diagnosis, in-situ monitoring, on-site inspection, data driven