A Damage-Based Maintenance and Repair Optimization Method Using Linear Programming for Bridges

Abstract—Maintenance, repair and replacement actions for bridges become necessary due to aging of these structures in time. Apart from heavy traffic loading, the most prominent cause of bridge aging is material deterioration in time due to environmental factors. In the long term, the bridge engineering is expected to gradually focus more on the inevitable stage of maintaining the existing bridges than the stage of constructing new bridges. During the past decades, a variety of bridge maintenance management methodologies have been developed to cost-effectively allocate limited budgets to deteriorating highway bridges. A major objective of a BMS (Bridge Management System) is to assist bridge administrations in making consistent and cost-effective decisions related to bridge activities on a system-wide basis. This paper presents a linear programming optimization technique for the selection of bridge element maintenance and repair actions established as part of a BMS developed in Turkey.