Advanced Decision Support in the Ontario Bridge Management System

Abstract

The Ministry of Transportation of Ontario (MTO) has engaged Stantec Consulting, Ltd. to develop a new state-of-the-art Bridge Management System to support the management of the Province’s 3000 bridges. Developed in Visual Basic, the software will exploit object technology to produce a practical decision support system that recognizes the complexities of bridge management. A bridge management system (BMS) supports policy and programming decisions by predicting the engineering and economic outcomes that may result from those decisions. To do this, a BMS incorporates deterioration models, cost models, business rules for treatment selection and costing, and an analytical framework for calculating and presenting information relevant to the decision at hand. In Ontario, nearly all project-level decision-making in bridge management is performed by structural engineers, based in MTO’s five regions, which conduct biennial inspections and plan future work. The new BMS is therefore designed to satisfy the decision support needs of these engineers, by providing life-cycle cost and tradeoff information in the field while the engineer visits each bridge for inspections. This paper describes the engineering models used in project-level analysis. Background Long an innovator in bridge-related software, MTO has some of North America’s oldest inspection procedures and software tools for bridge project planning. In 1998, the Ministry initiated a project to develop its next generation Bridge Management System, to be called OBMS. This system would exploit the newest advances in software technology and network-level analysis, to improve the decision support given to the structural engineer in the field and to Head Office staff in policy and programming activities. After a competitive procurement process, Stantec Consulting and subcontractor Paul D. Thompson were engaged to develop the new system. Prior to the development effort, MTO had studied current bridge management systems in other agencies worldwide, including Pontis (Golabi, Thompson, and Hyman, 1993) and Bridgit (National Engineering Technology Corp., 1994). The Ministry wanted a strong network optimization capability for budgeting and policy