Role of structural health monitoring in Pareto optimization of bridge management strategies

Appropriate assessment strategies of bridges including visual inspections and monitoring programs are essential for determination of efficient maintenance strategies. Nowadays, an important challenge is to include monitoring concepts in a general maintenance framework. The objective of this paper is to determine optimal assessment and maintenance strategies, considering multiple criteria. A reliability-based approach is proposed to include uncertainties inherent to the problem of structural degradation of bridges. The effects of the duration of monitoring on accuracy of the prediction results and on the maintenance strategies decisions are investigated. As the monitoring duration increases, more information becomes available but the monitoring costs are greater. Optimal inspection-monitoring-maintenance solutions are determined by using a Genetic Algorithm based procedure. These solutions consider multiple criteria such as expected failure cost, expected owner cost and expected accuracy of the decision process, based on monitoring results. The proposed approach is applied to an existing bridge.