| Summary: | As bridge infrastructure ages, the deterioration of materials and hazard events reduce the service quality and compromise the safety of the structure. Therefore, there is a tremendous need for bridge maintenance planning, and such maintenance studies during recent years have focused on the life cycle aspect. To fulfill the budget requirements of life cycle maintenance, an important issue is to ensure that the limited maintenance budget is utilized in an effective way. However, there are few studies that have aimed to assess the topic of budget allocation and the adjustment of bridge life-cycle maintenance issues. In order to resolve such issues, a two-stage optimization model based on constraint programming (CP) is proposed in this study to deal with maintenance scheduling problems. This is facilitated by adopting the resource-constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP) framework, in which, three plans according to the maintenance time point are considered (i.e., early, middle, and late plans). According to the RCPSP concepts, this study views the budget ceiling as the resource limit, and maintenance plans as activities, so that the feasibility of each maintenance plan depends on the sufficiency of the budget. As the first stage, Model-I (the life cycle lifespan evaluation model) takes a life cycle perspective, evaluating how long it will take to keep all bridges in a serviceable condition with minimum expenditure over the planning cycle, and evaluates the annual budgets that can be used as a reference for users to draft a budget plan. Based on the planning result from Model-I and the actual annual budget approved for the current year, the second stage, Model-II (the annual budget allocation model) then reallocates the actual budget to take into account the importance of all bridges and different costs and benefits of maintenance plans, and revises the suggested annual budget values obtained by Model-I for the following years. Through a case study, the optimized result demonstrates that annual recursive implementation of this two-stage model satisfies the need to adjust existing budgetary data, and provides management personnel with optimized and realistic maintenance decision support for bridge infrastructure.
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