Development of the Swedish bridge management system by introducing a LMS concept

The Swedish Road Administration (SRA) has developed an information technology (IT) based bridge and tunnel management system (BaTMan) that is widely implemented by the organisation. The system is a tool for operational, tactical and strategic management. However, this system does not include systems and tools for managing optimisation and long-term planning of Maintenance, Repair and Rehabilitation (MR&R) actions due to service life performance aspects. This paper discusses the need of service life performance analysis for sound optimisation and long-term planning of MR&R actions in the bridge management. The paper presents a service life performance analysis model that is based on a Markov chain model and the MEDIC method. The model is developed to manage different kinds of degradation characteristic and yet present a uniform result expressed in conditional probabilities. The paper discusses also the need of systems and tools for describing objects on both an overall level and on a component level.