Applications of GIS for Bridges Maintenance Service

Abstract

AThe Bridge Maintenance Management System (BMMS) is an application system that uses existing data from a Bridge Management System database for monitoring and analysis of current bridges performance, as well as for estimating the current and future maintenance and rehabilitation needs of the bridges. In a transportation context, the maintenance management is described as a cost-effective process to operate, construct, and maintain physical money. This needs analytical tools to support the allocation of resources, materials, equipment, including personnel, and supplies. Therefore, Geographic Information System (GIS) can be considered as one tool to develop the road and bridge maintenance management system.This research aims to use GIS to create a database for bridge maintenance system. Two study areas have been chosen: the old construction bridge (Al-Qadisiyah) and the newly constructed bridge (Barboty). Both of them are in Al-Muthanna city\\Iraq. The creation of database was based on field surveying data. In order to monitor the damages and decline of the bridges, four periodically observations have been achieved. The first analysis of the observations was conducted by graphical analysis which gave the results between all the observations. The second part of analysis included the process of documenting the cracks observed in both study areas via hyperlink tool. This tool can display each of the bridge cracks in the form of window that contains full information for each crack such as, photo of the crack, station number of the crack, coordinates of the crack, type of crack, the crack description, and risk levels of the crack. This information may help to save cost, time and effort to decision makers in the relevant institutions.