Holistic analyses of steel-composite bridges - ecological, economical and operational assessment.

Although in the last ten years several projects and initiatives within the field of the holistic assessment and sustainability analysis of traffic infrastructures have been conducted, no consistent assessment basis exists on the national nor on the international level. One reason can be found in missing benchmarks applicable for infrastructures and not existing pre-calculated product data for bridges. For example, this information can be used as input data and they are necessary for a feasible application. This paper proposes an assessment framework developed particularly for steel and steel-composite railway bridges and studies different types of railway specific reference bridges. All investigations are based on the presented variants and detail analyses in the first part of this paper series. All results are calculated by performing life-cycle assessments, life-cycle cost calculations and operation encumbrance cost calculations, whereby an emphasis is set on trough bridges with a span of approximately 18 m.