Bridges Asset Management: Approach for Optimal Maintenance Decision Making

Abstract

Bridges represent a significant percent in the economy of many countries as major assets. They are vital to the country's road and highway networks. Bridges are subjected to harsh environment through their service life and consequently deterioration had occurred. Therefore, asset managers are forced to maintain networks in good service conditions, especially with limited funds in most cases. The main goal of this dissertation is to develop a decision support system (DSS) that aids decision makers in the industry of repairing and maintaining bridges to set an optimal maintenance plan for concrete bridges. A comprehensive survey for data collection was conducted in building the system's database. This database includes different factors that are incorporated in the evaluation process. Such data included bridge's defects, repair techniques and repairing costs. Dynamic programing software was used to develop the optimal solution for the maintenance plan via creating a family of Pareto optimal alternatives for the DSS developed. Egyptian bridges' network as a case study was implemented for DSS validation along with another virtual network. Results were checked by Egyptian maintenance's experts. Developed DSS (BOM-DSS) is capable of handling problems with multi criteria and multi layers of data as well.

Keywords: Asset; Bridges; Management; Optimal; Decision support system; Evaluation; Maintenance; Egypt; Budget allocation.