Japan's ageing population is depopulating the country and causing severe levels of debt. A consequence of these problems is that it has become difficult to maintain Japan's many bridges. Given the challenge of maintaining these bridges, we believe it is necessary to formulate plans that include discontinuing the maintenance on certain bridges. Therefore, we propose a triage method for managing bridges (e.g., highway bridges), much like the triage used by medical institutions to handle the large number of injured people after a severe disaster. The road network patterns can be used to decide whether to rebuild a bridge after the current one is decommissioned, as well as to calculate the demographic energy, the integrated time value of demographic energy,and the costs of operating and maintaining the bridge. We can create sequences for the decommissioning of each bridge using them as an index.
['Takaaki Kawanaka', 'Masanobu Matsumaru', 'Shuichi Rokugawa', 'H. Suzuki']
Employing a bridge triage method in municipalities with decreasing populations: An empirical analysis of the characteristics of road networks