Developing a life-cycle based management system for bridge disaster prevention

Since rising number of natural disasters has been the major threat to worldwide infrastructures. Civil engineers nowadays have to enhance the mitigation of hazards with the increase of structure service period. The thoughts of life cycle as new ideas come up and can help engineers to plan, design, build and maintain comprehensively for the longer service life of structures. In this study, the developing framework of a life-cycle based bridge management system (BMS) for disaster prevention is proposed that can be employed to improve the efficiency and the quality of bridge inspection work, to evaluate the capacity of bridge disaster resilience and to ameliorate the exactitude of bridge information. The developing system has the distinguishing evaluation functions for the bridge resistance to earthquakes, floods, service loads and deteriorations by collecting field inspection data and taking the planning and design information of existing bridges into considerations. The time-variant curves of bridge structural resistance to hazards during the service time of structures were going to be built by applying expert system technologies to construct evaluation algorithms for bridge management accompanying with strategies for prevention of disasters. Moreover, modular aid tools and the mobile portable system were also expected to be developed according to the practice and convenience of field inspection works. Effective strategies and practical methods will be studied in this research work. Thus the developing system will provide the functions evaluating the trend of changes in structural resistance required by the bridge authorities and engineers for bridge management and disaster prevention. In addition, the most important and continued part of the developed work is to put the system in use, which can feed practical suggestions back and improve the system in the future.