Practical application of bridge rating expert system to an aged bridge

This paper describes the details of how to predict the remaining service life of an aged RC-T girder bridge and how to make verification of the predicted results based upon a practical bridge management system (J-BMS) which integrated with the concrete bridge rating expert system (BREX) with either visual inspection data and concrete core test results. The authors have been developing the J-BMS that is able to predict the deterioration process of existing bridge members. The remaining service life of the aged RC-T girder bridge (KT bridge) can be quantitatively estimated by applying the BREX system, which is a sub-system of the J-BMS with field inspection data. In this paper, it was found that both the main girder and concrete deck had a remaining service life not exceeding a decade by using the BREX system. Additionally, the influence of the soundness score (safety indices) was shown by selecting the learning (supervised) data. The remaining service life prediction was also verified using the concrete core specimen test.