Decision Support Model for Allocating Maintenance Budgets for Bridges

This paper introduces a newly developed decision support model for allocating a budget for bridge maintenance. The model is built based on capturing the experts’ knowledge for the prioritization of criteria for selecting a bridge maintenance plan. A literature review and interviews with a group of nine local experts were carried out to identify the criteria for bridge prioritization for maintenance. A questionnaire survey was then designed and administered, utilizing multi-criteria decision-making techniques through face-to-face meetings with local bridge maintenance managers to determine the weights of the identified criteria and develop the utility curves for each criterion. The developed model consists of four major modules: (1) bridge ranking module; (2) prioritization module of bridge structural elements; (3) optimization-based simulation module; and (4) the outputs module. The model was validated in a hypothetical network of four bridges. The validation reveals that the model can assist bridge maintenance managers in setting a bridge maintenance plan, with a high level of confidence using efficient frontier analysis technique. Utilizing frontier analysis enables comparisons of mean costs of different bridge maintenance plans against different levels of risk to enable decision-makers to make informed decisions. The result of this study indicated that bridge structural condition was the most important criterion amongst all the criteria influencing the decision of bridge prioritization for maintenance, followed by traffic and bridge location. Moreover, bridge deck and parapet, followed by bearing pads, were found to be the most important of the bridge’s structural elements.