Maintenance and management of civil infrastructure based on condition, safety, optimization, and life-cycle cost∗

TLDR

Civil infrastructure maintenance must balance life‑cycle cost with long‑term performance, yet current systems focus solely on cost minimization, ignore safety, and rely on visual inspections that inadequately capture structural condition. This paper reviews recent life‑cycle maintenance and management planning for deteriorating bridges, emphasizing optimization that simultaneously balances condition, safety, and cost. The authors review optimization‑based planning methods that integrate condition, safety, and life‑cycle cost criteria for bridge maintenance. This multiple‑objective approach yields a large pool of alternative solutions that enables decision‑makers to select a compromise balancing performance and cost.

Abstract

Cost-competent maintenance and management of civil infrastructure requires balanced consideration of both the structure performance and the total cost accrued over the entire life-cycle. Most existing maintenance and management systems are developed on the basis of life-cycle cost minimization only. The single maintenance and management solution thus obtained, however, does not necessarily result in satisfactory long-term structure performance. Another concern is that the structure performance is usually described by the visual inspection-based structure condition states. The actual structure safety level, however, has not been explicitly or adequately considered in determining maintenance management decisions. This paper reviews the recent development of life-cycle maintenance and management planning for deteriorating civil infrastructure with emphasis on bridges using optimization techniques and considering simultaneously multiple and often competing criteria in terms of condition, safety and life-cycle cost. This multiple-objective approach leads to a large pool of alternative maintenance and management solutions that helps active decision-making by choosing a compromise solution of preferably balancing structure performance and life-cycle cost.