Abstract Manager

The beautiful Maritime province of New Brunswick is the largest of Canada’s three Atlantic Maritime provinces and is home to the Bay of Fundy which has the highest tides on earth. New Brunswick has more than 55 remaining covered bridges and is considered the Covered Bridge Capital of Canada.

New Brunswick Department of Transportation and Infrastructure (NBDTI) has recently completed implementation of an asset management systems for their main transportation assets. This includes a new bridge management system (BMS) and new highway pavement management system (HPMA). The systems were implemented in parallel as customized-off-the-shelf (COTS) systems. Both systems are advanced engineering asset management systems designed to manage the assets from top to bottom including inventory, inspection/data collection, modeling, forecasting, prioritising, budgeting and program development - complete asset management of all of the largest value assets managed by NBDTI. This presentation will focus on the BMS implementation.

The BMS will be used to manage over 6,100 structures consisting of bridges, bridge-sized culverts, retaining walls, wharfs, sea walls, sign structures and minor culverts.  Since NBDTI is a mature department that has been using a bridge inventory and inspection system for decades, a massive amount of legacy data had to be loaded into the new system. A number of existing processes were added as links in the new BMS such that the department could seamlessly call these systems from within the BMS. These features helped the client to smoothly retire the old system and adopt newly developed system.

Many improvements were made possible by the implementation the new BMS which include having  risk, deterioration, and cost models appropriate for local conditions; maritime-specific customization was required for deterioration, treatment and costs that were reflective of NB structure elements, materials, environment, repair practices and costs.

The resulting overall program has provided the Department with improved processes that will assist in applying risk-based decision making in bridge management. This paper will share challenges and lessons learned and should be of interest to any agency facing similar challenges.