Impact of Climate Change on Risk Assessment and Effective Maintenance Strategies for Bridge Networks Subjected to Corrosion

Given the impact of climate change on the society, climate adaptation for civil structures and infrastructure systems has become an urgent task. To determine an adaptation and maintenance strategy in a rigorous manner, the influence of climate change on structures and infrastructure systems should be quantified. Risk, a performance indicator incorporating both the failure probability of structures and their associated failure consequences, is suitable to be used to characterize the effect of climate change on the performance of structures and infrastructure systems. To date, several studies have been published on climate change effects on structures as well as the associated adaptation and maintenance strategies. However, most of those studies focused on extreme events such as hurricanes and floods, whereas there is little research on the influence of climate change on progressive deterioration mechanisms such as corrosion. In addition, these research efforts placed a greater emphasis on the performance of individual structures than on the performance of groups or networks of structures. In this paper, the effect of climate change on a bridge network (an important type of infrastructure system) subjected to corrosion is quantified. Girder replacement actions are adopted as the maintenance policy. Optimal maintenance solutions for the bridge network considering the effect of climate change were determined using optimization algorithms. The results show that the climate change can have a significant influence on the network risk and can alter the optimum maintenance schedule under a specific maintenance budget.