Network bridge management with life-cycle cost optimization

Abstract

This paper presents a strategic medium/long-term intervention planning methodology for managing bridges and other similar structures networks, during their working periods of life, assuring the required safety and serviceability levels and taking the available budget into consideration, useful to minimize the associated high life-cycle costs and also to prepare an eventual extra-budget request argumentation. The methodology processes a set of a different kind of information to achieve some support decision indexes like the minimum life-cycle cost intervention plan on a set of bridges during a medium/long period of time, for different performance levels and respecting all the user’s local and global restrictions. The bridge performance deterioration is predicted with a probabilistic process, the life-cycle cost estimation is based on some expected economical rates and some other considerations grounded on a Portuguese expert judgment base and the final optimization is made with a genetic algorithm.