Bridge Management Based on Reliability States and Whole Life Costing: From Theory to Implementation

摘要

In many countries, including the United States, the construction of highway system is virtually complete. The highway agencies in these countries are now moving the focus from highway construction to preserving and operating the huge investment in highways and bridges by making the best possible use of scarce resources. As indicated in a recent document (FHWA 2000), new knowledge is needed to provide the optimal decisions necessary to assess current performance, forecast future performance, and prioritize the intervention strategies in order to prudently manage the investment in highways and bridges for safety, serviceability, and sustainability. Such knowledge can be initiated through interdisciplinary research combining reliability, optimization and life-cycle costing. This paper is an attempt to encourage the reliability, optimization, and life-cycle costing methods to be applied widely in bridge management. The bridge management based on reliability states and whole life cost is discussed. Especially the role of maintenance in bridge reliability is explored. It is concluded that current advances in bridge health monitoring, ability to gather more reliable structural, environmental, and cost data, and advances in structural reliability are making it possible to translate these new developments into improved bridge management practice.