ABSTRACT
Civil infrastructure is an integral part of society and comprises publicly owned assets. In the modern world, highway infrastructure systems play a critical role in facilitating the mobility of people and goods. Throughout their service life, highway bridges may be exposed to a multitude of stressors. In general, these stressors cause the structural performance to gradually decrease over time, leading ultimately to structural failure. The consequences associated with structural failure can be large and widespread.
Comprehensive risk and sustainability assessment procedures are crucial in evaluating and ultimately mitigating detrimental consequences of structural failure to the economy, society, and the environment. In general, within a complete sustainability assessment, it is important to quantify the performance of infrastructure systems, especially those whose functionality is vital for economic and social purposes (Bocchini et al. 2014, Dong et al. 2014, 2015, Sabatino et al. 2015a, 2015b, Frangopol and Soliman 2016). In order to mitigate the detrimental impacts of structural failure, risk and sustainability indicators are utilized within an efficient life-cycle maintenance optimization procedure to find maintenance strategies that balance both cost and performance. The results from this optimization may be employed within a risk and sustainability-informed decision making process.
Utility theory is employed in order to effectively capture the sustainability performance of highway bridges and impact of the decision maker’s risk attitude (Sabatino et al. 2015a, 2015b). The utility-based sustainability performance metric depends on three attributes (i.e., economic, social, and environmental), measured with different units. Within this approach, the desirability of each alternative is quantified in terms of utility, a normalized metric bounded between 0 and 1. Multi-criteria optimization procedures are employed in order to determine optimum maintenance strategies that simultaneously maximize sustainability and minimize life-cycle maintenance costs of highway bridges.
