ABSTRACT
Along Germany’s federal trunk roads, which have a total length of around 55,000 km and constitute around 25 % of the total road network, there are currently 34,630 bridges. The total area of these bridges comes to nearly 24 million square metres. Although around 80 % of these bridges were built after the Second World War, the maintenance of the structures will be one of the major tasks of the future. In order to ensure the structural stability, traffic safety and proper functioning of bridges in the long term too, a Bridge Management System (BMS) is currently being developed, which is designed to implement purposeful maintenance strategies by intensifying the use of electronic data processing. The BMS is composed of seven modules, which are subdivided into several subject groups. This paper will explain the modules and describe the status of their development.
