Development of an optimum maintenance strategy for infrastructure

Worldwide, due to aging of vast asset of infrastructure, effective maintenance of infrastructures is increasingly sought by asset managers. In an ageing infrastructure, various potential deficiencies i.e. failure modes can cause failure and consequently economic losses. Through an effective maintenance strategy, the catastrophic failures of structures can be prevented. In this paper, an efficient maintenance strategy considering different failure modes and structural components, which determines when, where and what to maintain, is developed. Within this maintenance strategy, time-dependent reliability as well as structural system reliability is employed. After mathematical formulation of the proposed maintenance strategy, in an example, application of the proposal to a bridge structure is presented. © 2017 Taylor & Francis Group, London.