Determination of the most sustainable bridge work programs through the improved structure level considerations

Abstract

Bridges are vital parts of public road networks. They are maintained through the execution of maintenance interventions to ensure they continuously provide service to society. These interventions, however, should be executed in a way that results in the lowest overall negative impacts, i.e. the most sustainable work programs should be followed. A challenge in the determination of these work programs is that only some impacts are attributable to elements. Others, are only attributable to the bridge as a whole and require more modelling effort than what is currently done in many bridge management systems, and, therefore, require a different methodology to be used. In this paper, a methodology is proposed to determine the most sustainable work programs that systematically takes into account both element level and structure level impacts. The proposed methodology is demonstrated using it to determine the most sustainable work program for an example bridge. The advantages and disadvantages of the methodology, as well as possible future research directions, are discussed.

Keywords:

• Bridge maintenance
• intervention
• element level
• structure level
• sustainable work programs

Notes

1. The intervention types are the possible interventions associated to an element each of which can be related to a particular condition state of the element.

2. i.e. very low traffic volumes, the possibility to execute interventions without interrupting traffic, and the possibility to execute relatively small interventions on elements that are able to restore the elements to a like new condition.

3. Although the simultaneous execution of interventions on the group of bridge elements reduces the time invariant structure level impacts, in similar cases that the interventions are more frequent, there can be a relative increase in the sum of these impacts through the investigated time period.

4. This might not be the case for other bridges. It is, however, to be noted that the focus of the article has not been to determine how often a special type of intervention should be executed on a special type of bridge, but instead the focus has been on the demonstration of the process to determine the most sustainable work programs for single bridges taking into consideration the bridge level and element level impacts correctly.