APPLICATION OF THE ANALYTIC NETWORK PROCESS (ANP) TO DESIGN ALTERNATIVE EVALUATION OF BRIDGES

摘要

Design alternative evaluation of bridges is an important decision making process before a new type of bridge may be built. The decision process is often to select the best of three bridge designs under the same span length, load carrying capacity, carriageway width and vertical clearance. In view of the worldwide trend, it become more significabt to develop a strategy and a systematic evaluation method of the overall performance of bridge design alternatives, because the method used directly affects decision result. The Analytic Network Process (ANP), now widely used in decision making with dependence and feedback, is a better evaluation method for bridge designs. This study shows how to quantify important bridge factors, build an ANP model about bridge design alternatives, create a supermatrix and synthesize to get the bridge ranking results.