The risk management process for bridges

Many bridges in the Netherlands suffer from overdue maintenance. The overdue maintenance increases risks and these risks are not managed properly by the owner. But how should a risk be managed? To make risk management function effectively and efficiently, it is necessary to have a proper and systematic methodology in place to periodically perform a risk analysis. A review of the literature has shown that there are at least 36 different techniques available to identify and analyze risks. However, only a handful of these is used in practice. The methods that are used do not stimulate that risks, problems, remedial measures and lessons learned from previous projects be captured and reused when developing new projects. The aim of this research is to find an efficient risk management process. In this research, the central research question was: How can risk management at Movares for bridges be improved? This research aims to give a solution to performance problems, which requires solution-oriented research. To structure the research the regulatory cycle is used. The regulatory cycle consists of five phases,1) Problem definition 2) Diagnosis 3) Design 4) Implementation 5) Evaluation. The first four phases will be considered in this research. Out of the results, the conclusion can be drawn that the current risk management process at Movares does not meet the requirements. The current risk management process steps are lacking with respect to several requirements. To improve the risk management process, a database library with standard risks and risk measures as well as a new FMECA application is needed. After analyzing 20 different FMECA’s the conclusion is that there is much variation in the resulting data in the FMECA and that it is possible to standardize the decomposition and some of the columns that describe the function and possible failures. The database does not ensure that all the requirements are met. To ensure that more requirements are met a better version of the risk analysis application is needed. Out of the research, Relatics emerged as the best option. With Relatics many quality improvements will be done, it will save time and there are more possibilities for new technologies in the future. To come back to the research question, the risk management process can be improved to create a database and to switch from Excel to Relatics. With these improvements, most of the requirements will be met.