Optimization of bridge elements maintenance strategy

For existing bridges, maintenance activities are important for bridge safety and management. However, the implements of maintenance activities cause traffic jams, detours, and thus tremendous user costs. In order to reduce user costs resulted from maintenance activities as well as to maintain bridge elements in good statuses, this paper proposes a concept of bridge elements concurrent maintenance. The concept of concurrent maintenance attempts to integrate maintenance timing of different elements of a bridge in order to reduce user costs from the life-cycle cost point of view. Constraint programming is conducted to find the optimal maintenance strategy. The results showed that the proposed model reduces effectively the total user cost and the total life cycle cost of bridge maintenance within the analysis period.