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Proceedings of the International Conference on Sustainable Materials, Systems and Structures (SMSS2019) - Challenges in Design and Management of Structures

Civil engineering structures are designed to stay in service for at least several decades. Due to their significance in the political economy the request for sustainable, meaning highly advanced, cost-effective, environmentally friendly and long-living structures is outstanding. The current practice of structural design generally focuses on optimizing the economic and performance aspects of construction. In particular for bridges, it does not enable to fully optimize the operation and end-of-life strategies. Maintenance strategies may be different from one design solution to another and one solution can appear to be more attractive at the design stage but less interesting when the entire life-cycle is considered, all the more, when user costs are also considered in the decision process. In this context, the request for sustainable structures is urgent, especially in view of a 100-year planned lifetime. Besides, it is well known that a majority of existing bridges around the world was constructed in the 60’s and 70’s of the 20th century. A challenge is now to manage transportation infrastructure networks as a whole and to identify best practices and processes to assure adequate safety and serviceability levels for existing structures. Inspection and maintenance optimization based on rational life-cycle indicators then plays a crucial role to tackle structural degradation processes in the most efficient way. For these reasons, a holistic approach is proposed to provide stakeholders with decision management tools from the construction to the end-of-life. It aims at combining economic, social and performance analyses during service lifetime, ensure that the concepts are optimal in the long term, not just at the point of construction, and deal with existing structures in an economic and sustainable way. Case studies will be presented, considering the multi-scale (system/network, stock, bridge…) and the multicriteria complexities to illustrate several types of applications and possible outputs of life-cycle analyses.

life-cycle analysis, bridges, networks, design, inspection, maintenance, management, decision process, optimization.

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