How to close the gap between applied strategies for infrastructure maintenance planning and the current state of research?

Bridges and tunnels are the critical parts of the transport infrastructure. The efficient maintenance of their structural performance during service life requires strategies for scheduling inspections and possible structural and/or organization interventions over time. Infrastructure owners have developed such strategies that are characterized by a corrective (failure based) and predetermined preventive (e.g. time‐based or use‐based) maintenance approach. It is broadly recognized that the currently applied strategies do not provide the basis for the optimal allocation of resources into maintenance of bridges and tunnels of the traffic infrastructure. The complexity of defining efficient and proactive maintenance strategies of structures is also well recognized by the academia, and promising solutions for maintenance decision‐making based on structural reliability methods and Bayesian Decision Theory have been developed and broadly discussed in the last decades. The suggested methods have, in principle, the potential to become the basis for efficient decision making in bridge and tunnel maintenance. However, they are not yet well implemented in a practical context.

In the current contribution we identify the gap between the technological developments in research and the corresponding applied knowledge in practice. Furthermore, we discuss how this gap might be closed. Special emphasis is directed to the corresponding role of standardization and education.