Bridges

Dubai is known for its impossibly tall skyscrapers, confoundingly large shopping malls and unbearable summer heat. One aspect of this gleaming city that is sometimes overlooked is its varying array of beautiful vehicular bridges, tiled underpasses and tunnels, air-conditioned pedestrian bridges and camel crossings under desert highways. ith over 750 structures in its transport structure inventory, Dubai’s Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) commissioned a Bridge Maintenance Management System (BMMS) to assist their maintenance team in identifying, tracking and repairing defects, storing inventories and photographs and forecasting maintenance budgets. Aurecon Engineering, in partnership with South Africa’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), are developing the GIS-based Dubai BMMS, creating a highly visual and user-friendly interface. Modules of structure prioritization, element deterioration, life-cycle costing and budgeting employ simplified equations that can be readily interrogated by the user. The objective of the Dubai BMMS is to produce maintenance activity priorities and budgeting reports that make sense to the bridge maintenance engineer and can be applied directly in the development of purchase orders to carry out maintenance activities. Dubai’s BMMS emphasises the use of experienced bridge engineers for the condition survey, as this is considered the most important element of any Bridge Management System. The condition survey is based primarily on the rating of defects and uses a system of Degree-Relevancy-Urgency. The relevancy rating enables the bridge inspector to evaluate the defects in terms of their impact on the bridge’s structural integrity and on the safety of the user. A prioritization system of maintenance actions was developed to accommodate the diverse types of structures in Dubai.