Safety Assessment of Highway Bridge Considering the Traffic Environments

摘要

Current highway bridge design is based on conservative assumptions regarding the intensity of the applied loads and the structural response of the bridges to these loads.Although these designs have served the public very well by providing a network of safe and economic bridge infrastructure systems, they may not offer the most optimum approach for assessing the safety of existing bridges.The extreme traffic load effects on existing bridges may be quite different from those of design live loads due to various local traffic environments as well as structural response characteristics.However, the current bridge maintenances of in-service bridges are performed to maintain the required load capacities that have been aimed at the design stage.The real traffic conditions on existing bridges may require considerably different required load capacities from what the designer has assumed at the design stage.The target required load capacities for rational maintenance plans of existing highway bridges, therefore, should be evaluated considering the characteristics of the extreme load effects and the target service/safety levels.