Integrated Multiple-Element Bridge Management System

This paper presents the development of a comprehensive bridge management system that optimizes repair decisions considering multiple bridge elements and large networks of bridges. The strength of the system stems from its integration of project-level decisions of the best repair strategies to use on the elements of each bridge, and network-level decisions of the most beneficial repair year for each bridge. These decisions, however, represent complex optimization problems that traditional optimization techniques are often unable to solve. To handle such a large problem, the proposed system uniquely segments the problem into smaller sequential optimizations that are solved using the genetic algorithms technique. The system uses a year-by-year optimization formulation to maximize the benefit/cost ratio of the repairs, and to maximize the overall network condition. The paper provides a description of the multiple-element system, its life-cycle formulation, and its related models for deterioration analysis and repair cost estimation. System implementation and an example application are then presented to demonstrate the practicality of the system and its performance on different sizes of bridge networks.