ABSTRACT
The Swedish Transport Administration manages approximately 17,000 road bridges and 4000 railway bridges. This paper will describe some ongoing research projects and a look into the future. The rapid technological development opens up opportunities for new innovative ways of managing bridges e.g. drones used to inspect bridges and BIM to store the data from building, maintaining, and inspections of bridges. Swedish Transport Administration are financing and participating in several research and development projects that deal with inspection, monitoring, and managing of bridges and other infrastructure. This paper will describe some of the initiatives that have the largest potential to improve asset management in the future. The first project presented is a project called HDMI. The project started as a first step towards using BIM in Swedish Transport Administrations bridge maintenance and not just for the building stage. Some of the findings of the project will be presented. The second project is called StegA. The purpose of the project was to provide an overview of various possibilities that are available for data that is produced during measurements, checks, operation, etc. and is connected to the correct object or roads/ railways) or position in the landscape. This is data that is common today produced for a specific purpose but which has great potential to be used from a broader perspective. In the third project presented, five large bridges were inspected with drones. The project started for the Swedish Transport Administration to learn the benefits and disadvantages compared with a visual inspection.
