A Fuzzy Approach for Maintenance Management of Urban Roadway Bridges

Abstract

A successful bridge management system needs to utilise an efficient decision-making model for prioritising the bridges for repair and maintenance operations to deal with the limited allocated funds. Models based on certain mathematics and divalent logic that need accurate data are not flexible with the uncertainty space of project management procedure and lead to imprecise outputs. Unlike classical logic, fuzzy logic represents the propositions with degrees of truthfulness and falsehood. In this paper, a fuzzy decision-making model was developed to prioritise a large number of urban roadway bridges and put them on the agenda for repair and maintenance operations. The proposed model considers experts' feelings, knowledge, and judgment expressed by linguistic variables, vague data or uncertain values in the modelling. The introduced model uses a fuzzy multi-attribute decision-making matrix to evaluate a large number of bridges to a large number of effective factors in the bridge maintenance area and determines the fuzzy desirability priority of each bridge as well as the preference value of every bridge to another one. This capability makes the model adaptable for a particular region or condition and helps managers make quick and more accurate strategic decisions.