Modelling railway bridge degradation based on historical maintenance data

As structures deteriorate with age and use, it is necessary to devise a maintenance plan to control their states in a cost effective way. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of alternative maintenance strategies their success must be measured by their ability to control the structure condition. T...

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Main Authors: Le, Bryant, Andrews, John
Format: Article
Published: Taylor & Francis 2016
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Online Access:https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/46730/
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author Le, Bryant
Andrews, John
author_facet Le, Bryant
Andrews, John
author_sort Le, Bryant
building Nottingham Research Data Repository
collection Online Access
description As structures deteriorate with age and use, it is necessary to devise a maintenance plan to control their states in a cost effective way. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of alternative maintenance strategies their success must be measured by their ability to control the structure condition. The condition can be expressed for either the entire structure or for the components which make up the structure. A problem is how to express this condition. This is a particular problem for bridges where there can be several deterioration mechanisms taking place and there is no clear way of measuring the current state of either the structure or its elements. One approach to defining the condition of bridges is to use condition scores or condition indices, for the infrastructure owners, as it is desirable that they understand how their population of assets is changing over time. For bridges this has involved providing a condition rating for each structure based on observation and by tracking the changes in the distribution of structure condition for population over time. The current maintenance strategy can then be shown to be inadequate (leading to deteriorating population condition), adequate (producing a stable population condition) or effective and resulting in an improving population condition. There have been a variety of bridge condition scoring systems that have been devised by different infrastructure owners in both the highway and railway sectors. Whilst these scores are not devised to be used in detailed maintenance modelling, due to the lack of alternative data they have frequently been used in this manner. This paper addresses the problems of using this data for bridge degradation modelling and proposes an alternative method to model the degradation of bridge elements using historical work done data. The deterioration process is modelled by a Weibull distribution that governs the time a component deteriorates to a degraded condition state following a repair. The method is demonstrated on real historical maintenance data where the analyses of the deterioration processes of several main bridge components are presented.
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spelling nottingham-467302020-05-04T17:42:06Z https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/46730/ Modelling railway bridge degradation based on historical maintenance data Le, Bryant Andrews, John As structures deteriorate with age and use, it is necessary to devise a maintenance plan to control their states in a cost effective way. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of alternative maintenance strategies their success must be measured by their ability to control the structure condition. The condition can be expressed for either the entire structure or for the components which make up the structure. A problem is how to express this condition. This is a particular problem for bridges where there can be several deterioration mechanisms taking place and there is no clear way of measuring the current state of either the structure or its elements. One approach to defining the condition of bridges is to use condition scores or condition indices, for the infrastructure owners, as it is desirable that they understand how their population of assets is changing over time. For bridges this has involved providing a condition rating for each structure based on observation and by tracking the changes in the distribution of structure condition for population over time. The current maintenance strategy can then be shown to be inadequate (leading to deteriorating population condition), adequate (producing a stable population condition) or effective and resulting in an improving population condition. There have been a variety of bridge condition scoring systems that have been devised by different infrastructure owners in both the highway and railway sectors. Whilst these scores are not devised to be used in detailed maintenance modelling, due to the lack of alternative data they have frequently been used in this manner. This paper addresses the problems of using this data for bridge degradation modelling and proposes an alternative method to model the degradation of bridge elements using historical work done data. The deterioration process is modelled by a Weibull distribution that governs the time a component deteriorates to a degraded condition state following a repair. The method is demonstrated on real historical maintenance data where the analyses of the deterioration processes of several main bridge components are presented. Taylor & Francis 2016-03-11 Article PeerReviewed Le, Bryant and Andrews, John (2016) Modelling railway bridge degradation based on historical maintenance data. Safety and Reliability, 35 (2). pp. 32-55. ISSN 2469-4126 bridge asset management degradation modelling lifetime analysis historical work done Weibull distribution http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09617353.2015.11691040 doi:10.1080/09617353.2015.11691040 doi:10.1080/09617353.2015.11691040
spellingShingle bridge
asset management
degradation modelling
lifetime analysis
historical work done
Weibull distribution
Le, Bryant
Andrews, John
Modelling railway bridge degradation based on historical maintenance data
title Modelling railway bridge degradation based on historical maintenance data
title_full Modelling railway bridge degradation based on historical maintenance data
title_fullStr Modelling railway bridge degradation based on historical maintenance data
title_full_unstemmed Modelling railway bridge degradation based on historical maintenance data
title_short Modelling railway bridge degradation based on historical maintenance data
title_sort modelling railway bridge degradation based on historical maintenance data
topic bridge
asset management
degradation modelling
lifetime analysis
historical work done
Weibull distribution
url https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/46730/
https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/46730/
https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/46730/