Maintenance prioritization method for networked bridges

Bridge owners and their representatives currently face ever-increasing tasks to effectively maintain normal functionality of a huge inventory of deteriorated bridges. This is due to adverse impacts of local defects, traffic loading and vibrations, disasters, aggressive environments, etc. The allocated budget is usually small and covers only 30% to 70% of the actual maintenance needs, and so the necessary site maintenance is compulsorily postponed or cancelled. This fact gives a difficult problem to be solved: whether the overall performance of all bridges should be ensured, or whether maximum values of maintenance resources should be generated. This article therefore presents a computational procedure called ‘the maintenance prioritization method’ to prioritize maintenance work in accordance with available allocated resources, based on a computerized database. For each fiscal year, the priority indices are calculated for all bridges to determine the prioritized work and to select the scope of site maintenance. The priority index is calculated by considering several indicators such as the bridge speciality, the health condition, or the maintenance benefit (which is calculated individually or by whole origin-destination network analysis). The proposed method has been practically applied to a specific bridge network in Vietnam to examine whether it is useful to prioritize the most necessary maintenance work such as deteriorated bridges, whose performance is crucial to the transportation network. Currently, the application of this method is limited to a local network in one fiscal year, but in the future it could be extended to a whole country and used to establish long-term strategies.