Keywords: bridges, degradation models, asset management, maintenance modelling, Petri nets.

The UK railway network operates and maintains more than 35,000 railway bridges. A large proportion of the railway bridge population was constructed more than 100 years ago and many of them were not designed to meet the current network demand. With an expected increasing rate of deterioration due to the increasing traffic loads and intensities anticipated on the network, the task of effectively managing these assets, with limited financial resources, is a significant challenge. This paper demonstrates a Petri net modelling approach to bridge asset management. Initially historical maintenance data for each bridge component is studied to gain the deterioration rates. These were established from previous maintenance actions where the intervention was triggered by a certain type of defect. The analysis gives the distribution of times for the bridge element to degrade to a certain condition state. A Petri net bridge model is then developed, accounting for the degradation distributions, service frequency, inspection frequency, repair delay time and different repair strategies, providing a means of predicting the future condition of bridge element resulting from different maintenance strategies. The model offers a alternative way of modelling the bridge asset management and overcomes the limitations in the current modelling techniques which utilise condition scores. The use of the model and details of the solution routine based on the Monte Carlo simulation method is also discussed in the paper.

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