Predictive Maintenance of Cable Supported Bridges: Integrating Damage Evolution, Cost Analysis, and Data-Driven Decision Support

The predictive maintenance of large-scale civil infrastructure is emerging as a strategic frontier in the effort to ensure long-term resilience, reduce lifecycle costs, and prioritize safety. This contribution explores an integrated framework for the predictive maintenance of suspension bridges, coupling deterioration modelling with parametric cost-effectiveness analyses and long-term planning optimization. The degradation processes due to ageing are first reviewed and technical expressions to implement in simpler models are identified. A simple case study that highlights the problems and allows to compare different maintenance strategies serves as an example of application of the main steps of a predictive maintenance framework.