Development of a life-cycle cost analysis tool for improved maintenance and management of bridges

The Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act (MAP-21) of 2012 requires states to develop and implement a transportation asset management plan (TAMP) for their National Highway System (NHS). Life-cycle cost and risk management analyses are the main analyses expected to be included in a state\u27s TAMP. The life-cycle cost analysis (LCCA) can be defined as a process for evaluating the total economic worth of a usable project segment by analyzing initial costs and discounted future costs, such as maintenance, user costs, reconstruction, rehabilitation, restoring, and resurfacing costs, over the life of the project segment (TEA 21-1998). The proposed tool is expected to integrate the data from different sources, assign different confidence levels based on their accuracy, and use them as an input for LCCA. It will be an effective tool to compare the total user and agency cost of competing project implementation alternatives. With this, transportation investment decisions can consider all the costs incurred during the period over which the alternatives are being compared rather than just looking into the initial costs and create efficient maintenance strategies over the service life of a bridge. The main objective of this research project is to include risk management analysis into the TAMP through the development of a LCCA tool. Such a tool is expected to cover the most common types of bridges in Iowa, while integrating the available historical data from maintenance crews, contractors, and past inspections to the predictive models that take into account the cost of maintenance and repair during the service life, and provide a manageable approach to include indirect costs in the analysis