Life-Cycle Risk Assessment of Spatially Distributed Aging Bridges under Seismic and Traffic Hazards

Abstract

This paper presents a rational framework for the quantitative assessment of life-cycle risk of bridges within a transportation network. Bridge vulnerability is evaluated with respect to seismic and abnormal traffic hazards. The effects induced by seismic hazard are investigated by means of fragility analysis. Random earthquakes are generated using Latin Hypercube sampling technique, and probabilities of exceeding specific structural damage states are computed for each specific seismic scenario. Traffic hazard is assessed considering Weibull distributed time-to-failure of the bridge superstructure. Epistemic and aleatory uncertainties are accounted for in order to provide a rational assessment of life-cycle risk. Consequence analysis includes different levels of bridge serviceability (fully serviceable, partly serviceable, closed, and collapsed), and monetary values are used to evaluate direct and indirect consequences. Seismic risk, traffic-induced risk, and total risk are evaluated for a group of existing bridges located north of the San Diego metropolitan area.

Sustainability-informed maintenance optimization of highway bridges considering multi-attribute utility and risk attitude

“…Previous research efforts have effectively performed risk analyses in a qualitative [2,3] and quantitative manner [4][5][6][7][8][9] under a multitude of hazards for various structures. In general, structural components that are under relatively high risk should receive priority for maintenance interventions.…”

Life-Cycle Design of Bridges in Seismic Regions Based on Lessons From the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake

“…• Further research on life-cycle performance of single bridges and bridge networks under seismic and other hazards, including reliability, risk, resilience and sustainability has to be performed along the lines reported in [24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32].…”

Consideration of time-evolving capacity distributions and improved degradation models for seismic fragility assessment of aging highway bridges

“…Although such simplistic assumptions may aid in the ease of deterioration modeling and subsequent fragility analysis using finite element bridge models, it may lead to significant under-predictions of aging bridge failure probabilities. These underestimation of seismic fragility at bridge level are also likely to be propagated during life-cycle analysis of deteriorating bridges [17,67] as well as in reliability estimation of aging bridge transportation networks [40,59].…”