Quantitative Deterioration and Maintenance Profiles of Typical Steel Bridges based on Response Surface Method

Performance Profiles are essential to predict the performance variation over time for the bridge management system (BMS) based on risk management. In general, condition profiles based on experts opinion and/or visual inspection records have been used widely because obtaining profiles based on real performance is not easy. However, those condition profiles usually don't give a good consistency to the safety of bridges, causing practical problems for the effective bridge management. The accuracy of performance evaluation is directly related to the accuracy of BMS. The reliability of the evaluation is important to produce the optimal solution for distributing maintenance budget reasonably. However, conventional methods of bridge assessment are not suitable for a more sophisticated decision making procedure. In this study, a method to compute quantitative performance profiles has been proposed to overcome the limitations of those conventional models. In Bridge Management Systems, the main role of performance profiles is to compute and predict the performance of bridges subject to lifetime activities with uncertainty. Therefore, the computation time for obtaining an optimal maintenance scenario is closely related to the efficiency of the performance profile. In this study, the Response Surface Method (RSM) based on independent and important design variables is developed for the rapid computation. Steel box bridges have been investigated because the number of independent design variables can be reduced significantly due to the high dependency between design variables.