Sign and luminaire support structures are ubiquitous in transportation infrastructure. Collapse and inspection of these pose significant hazard to the motoring public and inspection personnel. There is a need to develop inspection protocols and understand regional variability in performance to enhance public safety and rationally disperse limited fiscal and personnel resources. The present paper outlines the foundation for a reliability-based fatigue assessment of sign support structures based upon research conducted for the offshore structure industry. This paper also outlines and evaluates a systematic procedure for using two-minute averaged hourly wind speed and direction data acquired at flat, open terrain, airport weather monitoring sites to create virtual weather stations (VWS) that can provide site-specific probabilistic models for two-minute averaged wind speeds, wind directions, and intersecting probabilistic models of wind speed and direction. These models can then be used as the foundation for reliability-based fatigue assessment of these structures.
展开▼
