ABSTRACT
The safety and operability of bridges are key elements for ensuring the functionality of highway networks. However, in Bhutan, road bridges are aging and deteriorating faster than they are maintained. This may be due to the current practice of bridge prioritization for periodic maintenance by ranking based on bridge inventory data and bridge structure condition data, as the ranking is affected not only by the actual condition of the bridges but also by bridge characteristics unrelated to the condition. Therefore, the statistical effect of indicator selection on the ranking of bridges for maintenance prioritization needs to be examined. This research explores the effect of different conceptualizations of maintenance prioritizations by analyzing how the rankings of the bridges change depending on what combination of bridge data are used for calculating the maintenance priority. This study will clarify how uncertainties in the subjective choice of conceptualization affects the bridge ranking for maintenance prioritization.
