PROCEDURE FOR INFRASTRUCTURE MAINTENANCE PRIORITIZATION

Worldwide, a significant percentage of bridges has exceeded the nominal design service life, leading to an escalating number of structural failures overtimes. As it would be highly impractical to replace all these assets, the focus has shifted to their upkeeping. This is generally achieved through regular maintenance interventions, supported by periodic structural health assessments. These last ones are commonly performed by means of visual inspections. The output of said inspections is commonly affected by subjectivity/uncertiainy due to the inspectors’ different professional backgrounds, knowledge and expertise. It goes without saying that any source of uncertainty is undesirable whenever assessing the structural reliability of infrastructural assets and planning their maintenance operations. With the aim of reducing the uncertainty in the bridge condition assessment practice, an holistic analysis of its sources is performed on the basis of a specific tool: the Semantics. On the grounds of the key extrapolated concepts, two novel interconnected tools are developed: a Defect Analysis Matrix and a Defect Grading Algorithm. These two form the novel Semantics-based inspective methodology, an improvement over the current-day inspection practice as it helps to decrease (and even halve) the uncertainty of the overall inspective process. The significant benefits of its application to a real-life bridge stock case study are then quantified by means of the Expected Utility Theory. The output of the above methodology constitutes the basis of a novel Reliability-based Bridge Management model, expeditious in nature but still comprehensive of the entire spectrum of civil engineering-structural risks. This model represents a departure from the complex and time-consuming Structural Reliability methodologies currently employed. Furthermore, it yields noteworthy results when applied to a real-life bridge stock case study in the form of an immediately-applicable maintenance intervention ranking. This swift approach allows infrastructure managers to promptly discern bridges in critical condition, ensure timely interventions and enhance bridge user safety.