Performance Evaluation and Remaining Life Prediction of an Aged Bridge by J-BMS

Abstract

This paper describes health examination and remaining service life prediction procedures for an aged reinforced concrete (RC) T-girder bridge via visual inspection data. The Bridge Management System (J-BMS) that was previously developed by the authors, and which is capable of forecasting the deterioration process of existing bridge members, was applied to evaluate the safety indices (health score) and remaining service life of the subject bridge based on these test results. Using these procedures, the remaining service life of an aged RC-T girder bridge can quantitatively be estimated by applying the bridge rating expert (BREX) system, which is a subsystem of the J-BMS that incorporates field inspection data. In this study, visual inspection was carried out on an aged bridge by professional visual inspectors, during which all variations of the inspection results were evaluated using a five-step questionnaire. Additionally, it was found that health score (safety indices) and remaining service life predictions were influenced by the learning (supervised) data selection.