Analysis of rehabilitation and maintenance work is essential foreffective bridge management. Only by correctly understanding costs, timing, and service life of rehabilitation and maintenance work canrealistic life-cycle cost analyses of bridges be made. Bridge rehabilitation and maintenance work were evaluated to determine representative cost models that can be used in a bridge management system. Cost and other data needed for the analysis were extracted from the bridge rehabilitation cost file (contract costs), rehabilitation records, rehabilitation design plans, and maintenance records maintained by the indiana department of transportation. Several problems related to the existing rehabilitation and maintenance work recording procedures were identified during the study. A major problem encounteredwas an inconsistent grouping of rehabilitation activities. Also, unit costs were found to vary substantially within the same rehabilitation category. The difference was partly caused by the wrong classification of rehabilitation activities and partly by the way bridge rehabilitation activities are let for contract. Often, two or more bridges are included in one rehabilitation contract, and only one unit cost per contract is computed despite the differences in the type and amount of work required for individual bridges in the same contract. It was necessary to discount these effects before determining representative unit costs. In addition, a manual inspection of maintenance records indicated the need for a refinement of the bridge maintenance work categories. This paper appears in transportation researchrecord no. 1276, Maintenance management 1990: proceedings of a workshop, jackson, mississippi, july 25-27, 1990.
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