ABSTRACT
Transport network is a complex system because it often contains thousands of many bridges and culverts with different materials, designs, components and is subjected to deterioration and random damage events such as overloading, flooding, scouring, and bushfire. With these failure risks, various management activities including inspection, load assessment, repair, strengthening of bridges and culverts are required and constantly require storage, analysis and communication of mass data. To manage bridges and culverts in such complex transport network, the bridge management systems have evolved significantly over the time. This study presents the development of an advanced asset management tool for bridges and culverts in collaboration between RMIT University and VicRoads (now part of the Department of Transport, Victoria, Australia. It inherits advantages of current tools such as cloud computing and stochastic deterioration models and adds some advanced components such as cost-based bridge importance ranking, system-reliability based bridge condition rating and structural health monitoring. This advanced tool aims to meet the current and future requirement for more streamlined and effective asset management of bridge agencies in Australia.
