This paper was presented at the `Strategic investments in structures' session. Ontario's Ministry of Transportation (MTO) is responsible for the management of approximately 3000 bridges on the provincial highway network. The MTO in recent years has been evaluating developments in Bridge Management Systems in relation to its own requirements. The Ministry decided to develop an all-new system, similar in network-level functionality to modern systems developed in other countries, but more detailed in its project-level capabilities than any existing system. The proposed system would build on a substantial body of research conducted by the Ministry over th epast decade in the subjects of bridge maintenance, rehabilitation and repair treatment selection, treatment effectiveness, and costing. The Ministry engaged Stantec Consulting Ltd. To provide this Bridge Management System, to be called OBMS, in a project which began in January of 1998 and is due to be completed by the end of 1999. Written in Visual Basic for client-server deployment, the OBMS is a completely new system from the ground-up, and not an adaption of any existing system. In addition to the prerequisite network-level bridge management applications, tools are provided which assist the field engineer in making project specific maintenance, rehabilitation and repair decisions. The system features a knowledge-based approach to treatment selection, and a tender item basis for direct and indirect cost estimation, which will provide project-level decision support to the Ministry's engineer-inspectors in the field. Fully integrated into the engineer's OBMS desktop are electronic maps of bridge and non-bridge data from the Ministry's geographic information system (GIS); input and output of electronic docuements, including inspection photographs; and historical data on maintenance and rehabilitation. Object-oriented methods for design and development have provided innovative approaches to user interface design, system in)tegration, and rapid analyst-in-the-loop optimization at both the project and network levels. This paper provides an overview of the OBMS and presents some of the unique features of the system. (A
Samenvatting