Life cycle cost of bridges optimization by considering the reliability of bridges

Maintenances are necessary to ensure the safety and serviceability of existing bridges. With the increasing number of existing bridges, maintenances cost a large proportion of financial fund and have significant impact on environment. Bridges like any other structure and perhaps more than most of them are affected by environment. Because they belong to sensitive and high costly structures, failure to maintain them will have devastating effects. Bridges are needed continuous maintenance in order to service properly during its life cycle. Therefore, in this study, the issue of maintenance and repair of urban bridges in Mazandaran province has been studied with regard to life cycle cost and reliability of bridges. To do this end, a mathematical programming model which is include minimizing maintenance and user costs as well as maximizing system reliability. In order to solve the proposed model, a multi-objective particle swarm optimization algorithm is developed. Also, a sensitive analysis is done on failure rate. Results show that increasing in this parameter cause to increasing cost and decreasing reliability, This indicates that the proposed algorithm is working properly and the results of this research can be trusted.