Condition assessment and maintenance perspectives of bridge structures in the city of Nis

Abstract

Bridges are civil engineering structures which very often dominate the environment or landscape where they are situated by their size, appearance in space and even by symbolism. On the other hand, preventive maintenance of these structures, as an optimum solution, is paid insufficient deal of attention, especially in our country. A permanent increase of damage on the bridges is observed, followed by an enormous decrease of bearing capacity and safety, which means that it is critical to develop and introduce an adequate system of bridge management with an aim of maintenance and preservation of existing bridge structures. Bridge management system in Serbia was introduced in 1986, as an original, and extremely contemporary system for the time. However, its practical application exhibited certain illogical issues in the obtained lists of priority activities. The author of this paper, in his doctoral dissertation, offered a new proposition based on the optimized criterion of priority evaluation. This removed certain illogical points of the current bridge management system, and achieved a considerable increase of efficiency when making priority lists. The paper presents the proposed methodology based on the results of bridge monitoring over a period of several decades which was used to provide bridge condition assessment and its maintenance perspectives in the city of Nis.