The estimation of the present and future maintenance needs of bridges in a mountainous area is an essential task of the Austrian asset management process. Today, there are more than 5,000 bridges along the motorways and expressways of the federal road-network of Austria. The state-owned motorway company ASFINAG (Autobahnen- und Schnellstrassen-Finanzierungs-Aktiengesellschaft) maintains all 2,200 km.
ASFINAG decided to implement a future-oriented life-cycle approach, taking each bridge into account for short- to long-term maintenance planning. Based on a high number of inventory and inspection data, but also on long-term experiences of the bridge engineers, it was possible to develop the necessary models for performance prediction (Markov-chains) and bridge life-cycle modeling, and to implement the new algorithm into dTIMS. Within a successful pilot project, the data for all 5000 bridges was implemented and analyzed by using this new approach. Finally, the asset-specific results from different scenarios were compared over the whole network for the estimation of the maintenance needs over a period of 30 years.
