The AASHTO Committee on Bridges and Structures developed a Guide intended to offer guidance on selecting specific, cost-effective preservation and maintenance actions and treatments for agencies wishing to extend service life and estimate needed budgets to optimize performance of bridge inventories. It can be used to help preserve bridges and extend their service life by selecting cost-effective actions and treatments for various bridge elements based on exposure.

This course provides stakeholders in bridge design and construction, especially maintenance engineers and bridge inspectors with state-of-the-art information, guidelines, and practices for bridge preservation and maintenance. Specifically, the course assists bridge personnel in identifying candidates for bridge preservation; lists actions in bridge preservation; lists costs of actions and time intervals for use of actions; and presents a method of Preservation-Cycle Cost Analysis for cost evaluation of preservation actions, used to compute monetized benefits of preservation.