Modeling the optimal maintenance scheduling strategy for bridge networks

Abstract

An optimal maintenance scheduling strategy for bridge networks can generate an efficient allocation of resources with budget limits and mitigate the perturbations caused by maintenance activities to the traffic flows. This research formulates the optimal maintenance scheduling problem as a bi-level programming model. The upper-level model is a multi-objective nonlinear programming model, which minimizes the total traffic delays during the maintenance period and maximizes the number of bridges to be maintained subject to the budget limit and the number of crews. In the lower-level, the users' route choice following the upper-level decision is simulated using a modified user equilibrium model. Then, the proposed bi-level model is transformed into an equivalent single-level model that is solved by the simulated annealing algorithm. Finally, the model and algorithm are tested using a highway bridge network. The results show that the proposed method has an advantage in saving maintenance costs, reducing traffic delays, minimizing makespan compared with two empirical maintenance strategies. The sensitivity analysis reveals that traffic demand, number of crews, availability of budget, and decision maker's preference all have significant effects on the optimal maintenance scheduling scheme for bridges including time sequence and job sequence.