Bridge infrastructure safety assessment: Mitigating the risk of failure

Bridge infrastructure health and safety are major concerns for bridge managers. Hence, maintaining bridges within acceptable limits of safety and serviceability is among the main objectives of any bridge management system. This paper discusses three main criteria that can be used to evaluate bridge condition preservation and safety, namely, bridge condition rating, bridge load carrying capacity and seismic risk. The different bridges can be evaluated based on these criteria in order to identify the critical ones. Bridge condition rating reflects the condition of the bridge material while bridge load capacity indicates the reduced capacity of deteriorated bridges to resist loads. Seismic risk criterion prioritizes bridges that have higher chance to fail due to earthquakes. An innovative tool based on the Multi Attribute Utility Theory (MAUT) is presented to help managers in ranking and prioritizing bridges in order to identify critical bridges and to mitigate bridge failure risk.