B&TMS
The managing/owning bodies of road infrastructures seek to pursue the best maintenance policies aimed at maintaining civil works within safety, functionality and usability standards.
The Company has developed Bridge and Tunnel Management software which, starting with the information derived from monitoring the infrastructure, helps to identify the best scenarios for maintenance and optimisation of works on the structures in question, with the goal of providing a system to support the operator’s decision making process.
Management systems, fine-tuned by the Company, have a dual purpose as a database and a tool to support decision making.
Database
The database function is used to regularly record, on a single system, all inventory and inspection data of the works, in order to consult:
- master data
- historical data
- traffic data
- contractual documentation
- design drawings
- photographic documentation
- inspection data (both recent and past)
Decision support tool
The decision support tool function uses this data to provide predictions of future needs and prioritized intervention choices for different maintenance policy scenarios. Its aim is to:
- formulate maintenance and improvement policies at the network level
- suggest sets of interventions to be included in the annual projects, evaluating their cost/benefit ratio
- predict deterioration over the life cycle of a single bridge and the entire network
- predict the costs necessary to keep the network in service at the lowest cost, ensuring user safety
- foresee the necessary costs for the functional improvement of the net
- determine the optimal use of the available budget
Thanks to the experience acquired in the field of maintenance interventions, the models have been implemented with economic information, making explicit the estimate of the costs of maintenance interventions and relating it to the budgets that the managing body can annually allocate to maintenance, in order to achieve multiple objectives.
Goals Achieved
- Definition of appropriate planning for routine and unplanned maintenance interventions with the realization of a multi-year maintenance plan
- Identification of the best maintenance practices and the timing of interventions as a function of the current and expected state of the assets with consequent optimization of the resources available for maintenance
- Achieving or maintaining a certain level of network service such as to ensure the best cost-benefit ratio in the application of the maintenance policy