The New Ontario Bridge Management System

Ontario’s Ministry of Transportation (MTO) is responsible for the management of approximately 3000 bridges on the provincial highway network. The MTO in recent years has been evaluating developments in Bridge Management Systems in relation to its own requirements. The Ministry decided to develop an all-new system, similar in network-level functionality to modern systems developed in other countries, but more detailed in its project-level capabilities than any existing system. It would build on a substantial body of research conducted by the Ministry over the past decade in the subjects of treatment selection, effectiveness, and costing. The Ministry engaged ITX Stanley, Ltd., to provide this tool, to be called OBMS, in a project which began in January of 1998 and is due to be completed by the end of 1999. 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. It features a knowledge-based approach to treatment selection, and a tender item basis for direct and indirect cost estimation, for project-level decision support to the Ministry’s engineerinspectors in the field. Fully integrated into the engineer’s OBMS desktop are electronic maps of bridge and non-bridge data from the Ministry’s geographic information system; input and output of electronic documents, including inspection photographs; and historical data on maintenance and rehabilitation. Object-oriented methods for design and development have provided innovative approaches to user interface design, system integration, and rapid analyst-in-the-loop optimization at both the project and network levels.