Information technology applications for bridge maintenance management

Infrastructure maintenance management has become a challenge field for civil engineers and government managers because of the increasing number of deteriorated structures, their complicated spatial locations, the improved service requirements, the limited maintenance budgets and so on. Therefore, maintenance management approaches have been developed for civil infrastructures such as bridges and roads over the past several decades, but most of such approaches focused on one specific structure only – project‐level maintenance management. Now, there are increasing demands and appropriate conditions for network‐level maintenance management for civil infrastructure systems. Aims to explore such a maintenance management approach by integrating and applying the current information technologies, which include the database management system, geographic information system, genetic algorithm and the Internet. Several possible applications of each technology are discussed for solving real‐world problems.