Social Dimensions in Sustainability Evaluation of Deteriorating Reinforced Concrete Bridges

Structural sustainability requires that structural engineering activities should find ways to design and maintain structures that perform as required during their life-cycle considering intergenerational needs. Massive attention has been paid to the economic and environmental evaluation of structures. However, being a completely different discipline from structural engineering, the social dimensions associated with structures were rarely considered in previous studies due to the difficulty in determination and quantification, unavoidable subjectivity and controversy, as well as the lack of historical data. This paper identifies the social impacts induced by engineering activities associated with the deterioration of reinforced concrete structures, and proposes corresponding computational approaches from the structural engineering viewpoint. Utility theory is used herein to measure, normalize and combine different social attributes with consideration of the risk attitudes of decision makers. A case study is performed on a deteriorating reinforced concrete bridge to compare the social performances of different maintenance strategies based on the associated multi-attribute social utility values.