Optimized Bridge Maintenance Strategies: A System Reliability-Based Approach to Enhancing Road Network Performance

Abstract

Though road authorities have well-defined inspection protocols for evaluating bridge serviceability, gaps remain in understanding optimal timing and the impact of maintenance strategies on an individual bridge and its subsystems and, consequently, on the holistic performance of a road network. This paper proposes an innovative model based on system reliability principles that develops optimized bridge maintenance strategies aimed at enhancing the overall reliability of a bridge-dominated road network by considering the quantified impact of bridge component deterioration. Using the first-order second-moment method, we initially determine the reliability index for each bridge based on conditio..