| dc.description.abstract | Based on the road maintenance manual announced by the Ministry of Transportation and Communications in Taiwan, the bridge check must be regularly performed in Taiwan each year. Each bridge check contains the check of all structure components of the bridge. In general, it takes a long period of time and requires a lot of maintenance manpower to perform the bridge check. This means that bridge check scheduling is very complicated. In practice, bridge check scheduling is made mainly based on the personal experience of the decision maker, which lacks the perspective of system optimization and makes formulated bridge check scheduling inefficient. Therefore, the aim of this study is to construct a bridge check scheduling model where the actual bridge check constraints are taken into consideration and the objective is to minimize the total bridge check cost.
In this study, a bridge check scheduling model is developed, where the time-space network flow technique is utilized to formulate the potential movements of bridge check working teams among all bridge check points in the dimensions of time and space. Mathematically, the model is formulated as an integer multiple-commodity network flow problem and is characterized as NP-hard. The C computer language, coupled with the CPLEX mathematical programming software, is employed to solve the problem. Since the problem size is expected to be huge, a solution algorithm based on a problem decomposition/collapsing technique is thus developed to efficiently solve the problem. The numerical tests are performed using the bridge check data associated with Miaoli County, Taiwan. The test results show that the proposed model and solution algorithm could be useful for assigning complicated bridge check and used as a reference for the assignment of the bridge check.
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