Management Systems for Inspection and Maintenance of Chilean Road Bridges

Chile has a great heritage in road bridges, so it is necessary for the National Road Department to have a Management System for the maintenance of bridges, keeping up with best practices in developed countries. Although there have been some regional initiatives in this area, in the vast majority of cases maintenance plans are based on professional experience, evaluating the performance of the bridges either through the Bridges Department or the Regional Road Departments. These plans mainly consider the maintenance of traditional bridges (composed of concrete - steel beams, concrete slab, concrete pillars, pillars and direct or deep foundations). However, the development of bridge engineering in Chile has introduced new structural typologies such as cable-stayed bridges, suspension bridges, arch bridges, among others. For that reason, the authorities of the National Road Department, aware of the importance of carrying out a diagnosis of their bridges, decide to implement at the national level a Management System for the Conservation of Bridges. The article presents a proposal of this System for both traditional and singular bridges whose objective is to provide the National Road Department with a tool to improve the management and conservation of bridges through preventive inspections focused on the detection of major pathologies and on strengthening future maintenance programs, optimizing the behavior of bridges and the allocation of resources. The System allows the conduction of the inventory and condition inspection of the bridges, using then logical algorithms to obtain the severity index of the bridges, while it modernizes the data collection and its subsequent consultation and exploitation, using a web application to facilitate the access to information.