Keywords: concrete highway bridges, maintenance, information management, business process model, information model, standardization, modelling.

Concrete highway bridges undertake important roles in infrastructures and should be safe and kept in good condition. For maintaining, repairing, and rehabilitating concrete highway bridges, maintenance management should be carried out effectively [1,2]. In the maintenance processes of concrete highway bridges, it is important that the business process is effective and the quality of inspection is secured. The cost-effective and quality maintenance is dependent on reliable inspection and condition assessment information [3]. Reliable maintenance information influences a bridge management system (BMS) [4,5]. BMS does not use the standardized information, and cannot exchange, share, and reutilize the information. The maintenance information should be standardized, and is required for a cost-effective business process. The business process model should be constructed for utilizing the standardized information.

The primary objective of this paper is to develop a framework for exchanging, sharing, and utilizing the maintenance information in bridge maintenance. The information models for maintenance were constructed for standardizing the various maintenance data. The business process model for maintenance was constructed for cost-effective and quality bridge maintenance. These models are based on the ideas of project management and preventive maintenance.

For constructing the information models, the existing maintenance processes and information were analyzed [6,7,8,9]. The results analyzed were used for modeling the as-built process and information models. The required functions were analyzed and described for the to-be model by a use-case diagram in unified modeling language (UML).

The information models consist of member information models and business information models, and describe the maintenance information by using the class diagram [10]. The member information models describe the members of the concrete highway bridges. The business information models describe the input and output information of inspection and condition assessment. The maintenance information of information models was standardized and defined by an information schema in the extensible markup language (XML).

The business process was modeled by analyzing maintenance flow. In the business process model, the to-be business model was proposed so that the project manager controls the whole maintenance processes. The proposed business process model utilizes the information models. The information models are useful for exchanging, storing, and utilizing standardized maintenance information in a BMS in the future. By using information models, agencies and bridge managers utilize the standardized maintenance information. The maintenance engineers can then maintain concrete highway bridges effective by following the proposed business process model.

1

Seki, H., "Research Activities on Maintenance of Concrete Structures", Journal of Materials, Concrete Structures and Pavements, Japan Society of Civil Engineers, 557(5-34), 1-14, 1997 (in Japanese).

2

Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport, "Proposal of Concept in Maintenance and Renewal of Road Structures", 2003 (in Japanese).

3

Osama, A., Hussien, T.A., "As-Built Information Model for Bridge Maintenance", Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering, ASCE, 17(2), 105-112, 2003. doi:10.1061/(ASCE)0887-3801(2003)17:2(105)

4

Thompson, P.D., Sobanjo, J.O., Kerr, R., "Florida DOT Project-Level Bridge Management Models", Journal of Bridge Engineering, ASCE, 8(6), 345-352, 2003. doi:10.1061/(ASCE)1084-0702(2003)8:6(345)

5

Stein, A., "OKSTRA: The Key to Road and Transport Data Foundations for a Road Information System", AsiaGIS2001, 2001.

6

Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport, "Bridge Inspection Procedure", 1993 (In Japanese).

7

Japan Highway Public Corporation, "Maintenance Procedure", 1999 (In Japanese).

8

Metropolitan Expressway Public Corporation, "Structures Inspection Procedure", 2001 (In Japanese).

9

Hanshin Expressway Public Corporation, "Inspection Standards of Road Structures", 1996 (In Japanese).

10

Kubota, S. and Mikami, I., "To-be Information Models for Maintenance of Concrete Highway Bridges", Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering Computing, B.H.V. Topping (Editor), Civil-Comp Press, Stirling, United Kingdom, paper 243, 2005. doi:10.4203/ccp.81.243

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