A New Bridge Management System for Ontario

Ontario’s Ministry of Transportation (MTO) is responsible for the management of approximately 3000 bridges on the provincial highway network. A modern Bridge Management System is an essential tool to aid the Ministry in fulfilling its mandate to provide a safe, economical, and effective road network throughout the province. The Ministry has engaged ITX Stanley, Ltd., to provide this tool, to be called OBMS, in an 18-month project, which began on January 6, 1998. Written in Visual Basic for client-server deployment, OBMS is a completely new system from the ground-up, and not an adaptation of any existing system. The use of object-oriented methods for design and development have led to new insights on the organization of the user interface and data management methods; the ability to incorporate third-party capabilities for mapping and document management; and the introduction of a potentially very fast new process for analystin-the-loop optimization at both the network and project levels.