Trends in development of bridge management systems

Because of the importance of bridges as important civil infrastructures, different types of bridge management systems have been developed and being used around the world. At the moment, most management systems deal with manifest processes (i.e. ones that can be regularly observed and future behavior can be predicted with a small degree of uncertainty, e.g. corrosion of a steel beam.). There is, however, a need to integrate the consideration of the latent processes (i.e. ones that are not regularly observed and future behavior cannot be predicted without a large degree of uncertainty). In this paper, bridge management systems of different authorities are compared for the process of evaluation and prediction of bridge performance. This paper focuses on the evolution of how latent processes are being considered, evolution of the modeling of deterioration, evolution of the optimization techniques being used to find the optimal intervention strategies in different bridge management systems.