California Sea Grant College Program

Minerals Management Service regulators are charged with insuring the safety of over 3,800 offshore oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, for which little historical informa­tion has been maintained.

There are approximately 577,000 bridges listed in the Federal Highway Administra­tion's National Bridge Inventory, over 238,000 of which were rated as deficient in 1988 [Arockiasamy et al 1993].

These organizations and others like them require efficient methods to either perform or audit detailed safety assessments on the structures in their jurisdiction.

The goal of this research was to create a computerized system for the management of in­formation relating to infrastructure risk and safety assessments. Among the priorities for the system were that it allow access to information for decision making and analysis, that it function in a non-proprietary format so as to facilitate information exchange, and that it be extensible to a wide and unanticipated variety of types of structures, fleets of struc­tures, and analyses of those structures and fleets.