The need for cost-effective maintenance strategies for highway bridges is becoming increasingly important as these structures age and the demands for funding expand. Shortfalls in the annual budget to complete all the identified work also requires that rational procedures be formulated regarding when maintenance work on different structures within a stock should take place. Two main types of maintenance are considered: steady state and essential. The concept of an optimal maintenance programme is introduced. In most cases this is the ideal situation since it minimises long-term costs and disruption to users of the structures. In practice, optimal maintenance strategies may not be affordable when first introduced if there is a backlog of work resulting in a need to prioritise parts of the work. Prioritisation is discussed in terms of quantifying the consequences of deferring maintenance work, and ranking the bridges in the stock by their value of cost: benefit ratio of deferring the work. The use of a long-term plan to eliminate maintenance backlogs that arise from long-term underfunding is explained and the ‘long-term plan formula’ is introduced. A flow chart is provided to prioritise the maintenance on bridges included in a long-term plan.
In the UK large sums of money are spent annually on the repair and maintenance of structures. To avoid this problem in future construction, many government and private agencies responsible for asset management have recommended that designers should develop schemes that seek to minimise whole life costs, namely construction plus maintenance costs, rather than just initial construction costs. Currently there is no standard procedure for evaluating tenders in terms of whole life costs and therefore no way of checking that this recommendation is being fully implemented. This paper describes a straightforward model that can be used to assess the whole life costs of concrete bridges exploiting alternative durability options and shows how this model could be incorporated in the tendering process.
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