AASHTOWare Bridge Management
For nearly 30 years, AASHTOWare Bridge Management (BrM) has been widely used as the primary bridge management software for transportation agencies across the United States and internationally. The software is owned and maintained by AASHTO, a nonprofit, nonpartisan association representing highway and transportation departments in the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico.
The BrM software is a key product in the AASHTOWare software suite and has seen dramatic improvements since its initial release by Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) in 1990. As with all products in the AASHTOWare software suite, BrM is an enterprise software solution designed by transportation professionals for transportation professionals.
Today, the latest version of the web‐based software, BrM 6.3:
- fully incorporates AASHTO’s National Bridge Elements
- provides the means to collect and store multi‐assets (bridges and tunnels) inspection and inventory data for Federal reporting purposes
- allows users to track bridge preservation and maintenance
- allows users to perform bridge deterioration modeling
- analyzes performance, budgets, and guides the decision‐making process toward the most cost‐effective
- choices for bridge preservation, rehabilitation, and replacement
- provides a full suite of out‐of‐the‐box reports designed specifically for bridge management needs
Top 5 Things BrM Users Should Know
- BrM works off the shelf. Import your NBI/NBE files and go.
- Invest the time in setting up BrM correctly. Your agency will have meaningful and useful projects if time
and resources are dedicated to setting up BrM properly. - Support and training. Mayvue, the product’s consulting agency, can provide training courses, setup, and
configuration of BrM, and assist in the installation of BrM. - Validate often. Be sure to run validation on subsets of bridges throughout the year so that issues can be
addressed before the submittal season. - Help is always available! With a comprehensive user guide, technical manual, YouTube Channel, active user community, and growing knowledge base of articles, the answer is always just a click away.
BrM Management and Oversight
The maintenance, support, and enhancement of the AASHTOWare Bridge Management software are managed by the AASHTOWare Bridge Task Force comprised of state bridge engineering and information technology professionals. The Task Force sets the product direction on behalf of AASHTO and the user community in order to ensure that the continued development, maintenance, and support of the software is in alignment with federal mandates and meets the needs and requirements of state and local agencies and governmental organizations.
The objectives of the Task Force include:
- Strategic planning for the continuous evolution of the product
- Soliciting and facilitating the collection of feedback from the user community
- Grooming and incorporating the user community’s feedback into product features
- Creating yearly operating plans that identify specific deliverables in a given year
- Overseeing the product development life cycle for feature releases
- Ongoing collaboration with the development contractor, Mayvue Solutions, across all phases of the product’s lifecycle
Active User Community
The continued success of the BrM product can be largely contributed to the ongoing involvement of its active user community. Licensed members of the BrM product participate in different committees that ensure the product remains innovative and high quality.
Annual User Group Meeting
AASHTO hosts an annual user group (BrMUG) meeting with the purpose of promoting the software through presentations, training sessions, and forums. Members represent their respective agencies by guiding and supporting the AASHTOWare BrM product. Member feedback is collected, organized, and provided back to the community enabling them to vote on future enhancements, ultimately steering the continued growth and development of the product.
Customer Support
Mayvue uses Atlassian products (Jira, Service Desk, and Confluence) to track bugs, maintenance items, and enhancement requests reported by the user community. Members can submit issues and feature requests through
Jira Service Desk at http://support.mayvue.com or by emailing BrM@mayvue.com. Mayvue has a dedicated support staff that monitors and reviews these items for appropriate and timely resolution.
Product Training, Configuration, and Customizations
Agencies wishing to obtain additional training, assistance in configuring their instance of BrM, or customizations to the product can do so through Service Units. Service Units are optional fixed‐fee units of services offered through Mayvue. Mayvue’s on‐staff team of information technology and infrastructure asset experts can ensure that licensees are able to get the maximum value possible from the product.
Examples of services available:
- Preparing and importing data
- Specialized software training
- Agency‐specific modifications
- Agency‐customized reports
Some member agencies, or groups of agencies, desire additional development or accelerated development of optional component(s). These agencies may be in a position to fund such development and can do so through the use of Service Units.
The Task Force may deem the developed enhancement(s) to be beneficial to multiple agencies and if the submitting agencies can supply sufficient service units to fund development, the enhancement(s) will be included as a core component of BrM. Once included, the Task Force will be responsible for maintaining the component in all future versions.
Licensees are also able to purchase optional AASHTO Hosting and Add‐On (HAO) Service Units to enhance the overall capabilities of their product’s instance. As a web‐based system, BrM can be hosted through a web server owned and maintained by the agency or in a secure cloud environment through an agreement with Mayvue. HAOs can be used for this purpose.
The Future of BrM
As it has for the past 30 years, the BrM software is continually evolving to meet the needs of the state, local, and government agencies. In late 2019, the FHWA proposed to update National Bridge Inspection Standards (NBIS) to address Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act (MAP‐21) requirements, incorporate technological advancements, address ambiguities identified since the last update to the regulation in 2009, and more. The BrM software will incorporate these changes in the near future to ensure agencies continue to remain in compliance with all regulations.
Many agencies are looking to extend BrM’s components to have the same management and oversight of additional assets in their infrastructure network. In the future, BrM will enable agencies to manage their network over the whole lifecycle, including managing bridges, pavement, congestion, safety, and other assets. BrM will continue to play an essential role in setting goals and policies within an agency. By monitoring the network and its performance, decision-makers can set realistic policies and goals by comparing performance measures against performance objectives.
Additional Resources
- AASHTO website – https://www.transportation.org
- AASTHOWare website – https://www.aashtoware.org
- AASTHOWare Bridge website – https://172.203.244.208
- BrMUG website – http://www.brmug.com
- 2019 BrMUG presentations – http://brmug.mayvue.com