| dc.description.abstract | ABSTRACT
Taiwan Bridge Management System (T-BMS) was developed in 2000 by the Center for Bridge Engineering Research, National Central University, under the sponsorship of the Ministry of Transportation and Communications, ROC. Since then, T-BMS has been used by the bridge management agencies in Taiwan to perform their tasks. T-BMS now has an inventory that contains more than 25,000 bridges. Even though T-BMS is proved to be a working and successful system, however, there is still room for improvement: such as completeness of system functions, user friendliness, and users’ additional needs at various management levels.
Questionnaires and interviewing experts were simultaneously conducted in this research to discover weaknesses and opinions regarding the T-BMS. Among the results, a strong demand from the users reveals a necessity in rewriting of the “Maintenance” module, since the original one was not able to record the real maintenance practices. In addition, fields of the bridge inventory need to be revised for various types of bridges that have different levels of complexity.
A statistical analysis is also performed on the bridges in the T-BMS. Many characteristics such as number of bridges that have no names, number of bridges that exceed a certain length, etc., are counted for management needs. Finally, effective bridge management strategies are also suggested in this research. | en_US |