Decision Making on Repair Priority of Steel Railway Bridges Under Budget Constraint

Abstract

In asset management of infrastructures, it is necessary to design effective repair strategy and to not only minimize the life cycle cost of such countermeasures but also maximize their effectiveness. This study proposes a method to determine specific repair priority using cost-effectiveness as an index and also considering repair results in the past. The validity of the proposed method is investigated through an empirical study for 30 steel railway bridges. A feature of this method is that actual visual inspection for steel railway bridges were carried out, to take into account the results in the evaluations of current damage and the possible damage forecast by deterioration estimates. The repair priority was determined by comparing the cost-effectiveness of all the cases. In addition, as a result of placing some limits on budgets, it is verified that the quantification of the effectiveness of repair, and its evaluation based upon costeffectiveness, makes a decision on the priority of maintenance strategy and to level off total costs.