ABSTRACT
ABSTRACT Life cycle cost (LCC) is a vital economic evaluation tool for effective asset management towards sustainability. Especially for bridges, their maintenance and operation cost overwhelms the cost from any other stage. One obstacle in the current bridge LCC implementation is the inherent uncertainties for the input parameters. That is, without knowing the structural performance, most of the existing LCC models are only established based on the assumptions of various life cycle parameters. For instance, the remaining service life (RSL) of structural components, a key input in LCC, is highly related to the bridge deterioration process but often assumed deterministically in bridge LCC. With the advent of advanced structural health monitoring (SHM) techniques, the structural performance can be observed from the real-time monitoring data, whereas the structural RSL can also be estimated. Here, a recognized issue is that, the trade-off between the benefit and the cost of installing the monitoring system is rarely considered in the existing bridge LCC practice, i.e. the value of information (VoI). Hence, the present paper proposes an improved LCC framework with an illustrative case study, taking account of both of the structural deterioration mechanism and the quantification of the value the SHM information.
