DEVELOPMENT OF BRIDGE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS IN TAIWAN

This paper describes the efforts in developing several versions of bridge management system (BMS) in Taiwan. There were several versions of stand-alone BMS developed in Taiwan prior to the Ji-Ji earthquake that occurred in year 1999. Since many bridges were seriously damaged by this earthquake, the Ministry of Transportation and Communication determined to develop a nationwide BMS to have a better by control on the status of bridge maintenance. Implemented in year 2000, the Taiwan Bridge Management system (T-BMS) is now the dominating and mandatory system used by all the government agencies that are responsible for bridge maintenance. Having more then 25,000 bridges in its inventory, T-BMS has thousands of logins per month to update data in the relevant database. The experiences and difficulties of using such a nationwide bridge management system are discussed. Finally, future plans for BMS development are also proposed in this paper.