# Performance-Based Ranking of Existing Road Bridges
###### Abstract
BRIME (Bridge Management in Europe) [8] focused on the development of a framework for bridge management in Europe at a network level, also focusing on the development of deterioration models. ARCHES (Assessment and Rehabilitation of Central European Highway Structures) [9] is a research project focused on structural assessment and monitoring of highway bridges, load testing, and dynamic actions. SUSTAINABLE BRIDGES [10] is focused on the improvement of existing railway bridges, as their poor condition can have serious consequences, but they also developed a flow chart for the assessment of road bridges. In the Russian Federation, about 75% of the road network is located in the Asian part of the country, and about 70% of the capital bridges were built between the 1970s and 1990s. With an average projected superstructure lifetime of 43 years, the majority of these bridges need to be assessed and rehabilitated or replaced. For this reason, a new bridge management system was developed, based on the modern analytical information system (AIS) ISSO-N, intended for the monitoring, long-term planning, and development of infrastructure. Specifically, for bridges, AIS ISSO-N contains basic bridge data, including drawings, reports of previous assessments, data on structural elements, defects, and other bridge characteristics, along with an automatic engineering condition assessment module [11]. In the USA, the majority of highway bridges were also built in the 1960s, during a period when approximately 60,000 km of new highways were constructed [1]. Awareness of the inspection and maintenance of these bridges increased in the 1980s, as these activities had not been performed regularly until then, resulting in an overall poor condition of the transportation infrastructure. Therefore, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) initiated the development of the first national bridge management system (BMS), called PONTIS, in the mid-1980s [12]. Shortly after the formation of PONTIS, another BMS called BRIDGIT [13] was developed under NCHRP Project 12-28. Both BRIDGIT and PONTIS are used to input basic visual inspection data, incorporate Markov chain process-based deterioration prediction, and are used to guide bridge network performance optimization. Nonetheless, the current condition of more than 600,000 highway bridges in the U.S. is alarming and has been the subject of an extensive report by both Homeland Security [14] and the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), which estimates that more than $100 billion is needed for bridge rehabilitation alone [15]. In Australia and New Zealand, the transport infrastructure, consisting of approximately 50,000 road bridges, is relatively new compared to the US and EU. The road agencies of these two countries defined the key performance objectives for road bridge networksas functionality, safety, aesthetics, sustainability, and economic aspect [16]. However, in practice, the procedures are not uniform, as each of the regional road directorates has a different approach to bridge maintenance and management. For example, in Australia, the US-based BMS is implemented, while, in New Zealand, such an approach is not considered suitable due to the smaller number of bridges and a top-down approach to BMS is used [16]. In China, due to the increasing number of long-span bridges, a number of authors have addressed the issues of bridge assessment and maintenance in recent decades. For example, the work of [PERSON] et al. [17] develops a theoretical framework for the evaluation of suspension bridges based on various sources of inspection data, including visual inspection, non-destructive testing, and SHM tools. Standardization of condition assessment of long-span bridges is the subject of a paper by [PERSON] et al. [18], as part of a three-stage project addressing the standardization, assessment, and finally preservation of these bridges.