Bridges are exposed to very severe environment and experience, as service life increased, elevated traffic load and traffic flow, in addition to natural disasters. In comparing to other road structures, bridges may cause more significant damage, such as human-involved accidents, to the society in the event of collapse. A certain level of service shall be necessarily secured to assure the minimum safety of users. The cost for manage and preserve bridges will increase gradually and more restrictions will be loaded to efficiently distribute the limited resources, such as monetary budget and human resource etc. In order to enhance performance and serviceability of bridges with the limited resource, asset management technique has been applied into the bridge management system, which capitalizes the road infrastructures including bridges and assess them in accordance with the government finance report. In the application of asset management, there must be a tool for assess the performance of bridges and this study introduces the basic information on the definition and role of performance measures for asset management for bridges. This research suggests future development direction of performance measure for asset management for bridges in Korea.
This research was conducted as a part of research program KTAM-40, Development of Asset Management System for Social Infrastructures. Therefore, the authors are expressing sincere appreciation for the support from the Korea Institute of Construction and Technology.