Texas bridges deterioration rates

A recent (2017) Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) Rule mandated, among other requirements, that states have procedures for (a) collecting, processing, storing, and updating inventory and condition data for National Highway System (NHS) pavement and bridge assets, and (b) forecasting deterioration for all NHS bridges and pavements. The State of Texas' PonTex Data Base fulfills requirement (a) above by storing bridge and culvert inventory and inspection data. This paper discusses a research project that fulfills requirement (b) above. It is developing and validating families of bridge and culvert Markovian deterioration models, based on data from 480,000 culvert and bridge inspections over 18 years. The models forecast all four inspection ratings: deck, substructure, superstructure and culvert, and are split into families by traffic, environment type, material type, and other relevant variables. The models estimate the probabilities that each inspection rating in each validated family of bridges and culverts will deteriorate within any desired time frame. The outputs are deterioration curves and the future network status after 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10 years. These models fulfill FHWA's mandate (b) above for Texas. Culvert and substructure models were already delivered for implementation as of this paper. Deck and superstructure models are under development and will be delivered in after submission of this paper.