Maintenance planning of bridge networks using a binary particle swarm optimization algorithm

In this research, an integrated model has been proposed to manage maintenance and repair plans for bridges at network level. This model being sensitive to budget constraints aims at obtaining highest utility such that a stated minimum bridge sufficiency rating and health index requirement is met. A sample of 52 bridges was chosen from the bridge inventory of the state of Florida, building a network of 52 bridges for the BPSO to be implemented upon. The proposed model undergoes two different methods; the traditional deterministic solving method and the BPSO met heuristic.It can be observed that the BPSO model can produce fairly near optimal solutions in far less iterations.No doubt when a real size integrated network of bridges with more than 8600 bridges is at hand, the BPSO outperforms the exact solving methods.