Software agents in bridge management

Traditionally Bridge Management Systems (BMSs) have been developed as decision-support systems to assist bridge owners in maximizing the safety and the serviceability of bridge networks under budget constraints. Although the data stored in a BMS database can be of valuable use to other BMS users, most of these systems have been developed as independent stand-alone systems. Data accessing and transfer operations are performed manually. Towards this end, this paper presents an intelligent interface agent that facilitates the interactions between the BMSs and relief the users from being the controllers and the decision makers of these systems. This agent is autonomous, goal-driven, dynamic and collaborative, and acts as a mediator between the user and the bridge management environment. It builds modules of the BMS components and monitors their contents. This approach facilitates the reusability of this agent and offers the user a common, flexible and customizable interface that can be used for different BMSs. It monitors the contents of the BMS and provides the users with up-to-date information required for performance prediction and life-cycle cost analysis. The feasibility of the proposed approach is demonstrated using an example.