Decision Making On Repair Priority of Steel Railway Bridges Under Budget Constraint

When conducting asset management on infrastructures, it is important to plan a repair strategy that considers not only the minimization of cost but also the maximization of cost performance. Therefore, this paper proposes a method of deciding repair priority in which past repair performance is reflected into the decision-making, implementing cost performance as the index. Also, the validity of the proposed method is evaluated with empirical analysis on visual inspections of 30 steel railway bridges. In the empirical analysis, visual inspections were actually carried out on 30 steel railway bridges and the current damage and deformation was grasped, and also damage and deformation expected in the near future was extracted and deterioration estimation was performed on each in accordance to technician’s experience. Based on this, cost performance of all bridges was compared and the repair priority was decided specifically. Furthermore, the effect of lifetime extension due repairs is quantitatively analyzed and the influence of a budget constraint on repair strategy and remaining lifetime is presented.