Bridge management system and maintenance optimization for existing bridges

Recently, the maintenance of bridges has become a major social concern, and thus the development of a practical bridge management system is required. The present study is an attempt to develope a new bridge management system (BMS) for deteriorated concrete bridges by evaluating the output results from a bridge rating expert system that is currently under development. The proposed BMS offers various maintenance plans based on a combination of maintenance cost minimization and quality maximization. Genetic algorithms (GAs) are adopted for solving the optimization problem. These algorithms, which are based on the theory of evolution, create a suitable individual (optimal) solution through thr repetition of three operators: selection, crossover, and mutation. Furthermore, applications to several existing concrete bridges are presented so as to demonstrate the valididity of the proposed bridge management system.