Decision Support System for Optimum Lifetime Sustainability-Based Maintenance Planning of Highway Bridges

摘要

Robust decision support for the optimum management of engineering systems must contain a module for structural performance assessment, which may be accomplished with life-cycle risk and sustainability assessment procedures. A performance indicator representative of sustainability effectively integrates indirect (e.g., environmental and social impacts), as well as, direct (e.g., economic impacts) impacts. Within this paper, lifetime functions are employed to model, using closed-form analytical expressions, the time-variant effect of intervention actions on the performance of civil infrastructure systems. Additionally, multi-attribute utility theory is used to incorporate the influence of the decision maker's risk attitude on the relative desirability of lifetime maintenance strategies. Furthermore, optimization procedures may carried out that simultaneously maximize the utilities associated with maintenance cost and sustainability in order to determine optimum maintenance strategies under uncertainty. The capabilities of the proposed decision support system, specifically the aspects related to the sustainability assessment, are illustrated on an existing highway bridge.