ABSTRACT
ABSTRACT: In Korea the importance of management of bridges has been recognized over a couple of decades, resulting in the development of database and various bridge management assistant tools by both government and private sectors. However, none of them has truly included the expected features of the Bridge Management System (BMS) for the next generation such as the quantification of the effect of maintenance interventions. As a result, life-cycle cost analysis has been performed within the limits of analyses including uncertainties in terms of application time of maintenance interventions and of overall costs for bridge maintenance only. Recognizing the problem, a new research project has been launched to construct a bridge management system which has enough flexibility and extendibility for the next generation BMS. This system has been constructed based on new theoretical background and included many features which were not included in the conventional BMS. The system has been developed for steel bridges first. In this paper, background and important aspects of the novel management system developed in Korea for steel bridges is represented.
