Field Condition Informed Updating of Aging Bridge Fragility Models

摘要

Deterioration of the structural capacity of highway bridges has a potential to yield structures that are significantly more vulnerable to natural hazards such as earthquakes. Although time dependent bridge fragility models help to predict the vulnerability of degraded structures, inherent assumptions in the probabilistic modeling introduce significant uncertainty and may result in either under-or over-prediction of the damage probability. Hence, it is important to consider the actual field condition of the structure through sensing and health monitoring to reduce errors arising from modeling assumptions. This paper presents a framework for Bayesian updating of time dependent seismic fragility curves based on field condition data. The advantages of this study are twofold: first, it addresses the need and methodology required to incorporate new information available from bridge monitoring for fragility assessment; and secondly, it provides a more realistic estimate of bridge fragility under seismic threats for use in risk analyses.