Research On Bridge Management System For Earthquakes

Bridges hold the key positions in transportation system, the performances of them are related to economic development and people's lives. Bridge Management System (BMS) is created to ensure the bridge's performance by effective management. BMS, however, considers the general condition, and does not consider the natural disaster actions, e.g. earthquakes. A Bridge Management System for Earthquakes (BMSE) was developed in this paper to remedy this shortage.The paper reviewed the art-of-state of the BMS (including BMSE), and a general idea was proposed for BMSE. The database of bridge information was developed, and the methods to manage the bridge information were suggested. Six subsystems of BMSE were introduced, and three methods were proposed to evaluate the damages of bridges under earthquakes by both the code method and FEM. The program of BMSE was developed with the GIS and Database technology, and an example was used to demonstrate the practicability and reliability of it.The BMSE realizes the combination of bridge engineering and information technology, and supplies an effective supplementary tool for bridge management under earthquakes.