A Fuzzy Approach for Maintenance Management of Urban Roadway Bridges

Abstract

A successful bridge management system needs to utilise an efficient decision-making model for prioritising the bridges for repair and maintenance operations to deal with the limited allocated funds. Models based on certain mathematics and divalent logic that need accurate data are not flexible with the uncertainty space of project management procedure and lead to imprecise outputs. Unlike classical logic, fuzzy logic represents the propositions with degrees of truthfulness and falsehood. In this paper, a fuzzy decision-making model was developed to prioritise a large number of urban roadway bridges and put them on the agenda for repair and maintenance operations. The proposed model considers experts' feelings, knowledge, and judgment expressed by linguistic variables, vague data or uncertain values in the modelling. The introduced model uses a fuzzy multi-attribute decision-making matrix to evaluate a large number of bridges to a large number of effective factors in the bridge maintenance area and determines the fuzzy desirability priority of each bridge as well as the preference value of every bridge to another one. This capability makes the model adaptable for a particular region or condition and helps managers make quick and more accurate strategic decisions.

KEYWORDS:

• Fuzzy bridge management
• bridge prioritisation
• fuzzy ranking
• fuzzy decision making

Acknowledgements

The authors are also grateful for Tehran municipal technical assistance and all experts and engineers contributed in this survey.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Amin Amini

Dr Amin Amini obtained his B.Sc. in civil/structural engineering in 2004 and his M.Sc. degree in construction management engineering in 2010 from Iran. He immigrated to Australia in 2011 and granted the Australian Postgraduate Award (APA) to do his PhD in civil engineering at Curtin University which was completed in 2019. As a chartered professional civil/structural engineer he commenced his consulting engineering firm in 2018. His research interests include risk management of infrastructure projects, decision making in engineering and management using multi-attribute decision-making models and fuzzy logic.

Navid Nikraz

Dr Navid Nikraz obtained his B. Eng (Electrical) B. Comm degrees from UWA in 2005 and went on to complete his PhD in Electrical Engineering at UWA in 2008. He commenced his role as a Senior Lecturer at Curtin University in 2010 and currently supervises 3 PhD and 3 M. Phil students. His current research interests include: Asset Management, Options Analysis, Project Feasibility, Linear/Non-linear state space observation and power system protection.