Pavement Rehabilitation Strategy Selection for Steel Suspension Bridges Based on Probabilistic Life-Cycle Cost Analysis
Publication: Journal of Performance of Constructed Facilities
Volume 26, Issue 1
Abstract
Field inspections on long-span steel suspension bridges in China reveal that the pavements undergo a fast deterioration process attributed to the flexibility of suspension bridges and the heavy traffic loads. Such extensive damage and enormous repair costs call for a cost-effective rehabilitation strategy for these bridges. In this paper, the pavement rehabilitation strategy is investigated for the Runyang Suspension Bridge in China with the aid of the life-cycle cost analysis (LCCA). Three alternatives are compared for their economic efficiency, and both agency costs and user costs are taken into account. To consider the uncertainties that abound in the LCCA, probabilistic analyses are made in which the Latin hypercube method is used to provide samples of random variables. According to the LCCA results, the user costs are a considerable proportion of the total costs so that the selection of rehabilitation strategies is significantly influenced by the user costs. In this regard, the second alternative, the double-layer pavement (guss asphalt plus stone matrix asphalt) is the most cost-effective rehabilitation strategy for the bridge. Additionally, sensitivity analyses show that the traffic growth rates, the discount rate, the work zone duration, and the delay cost rate for passenger cars are the most sensitive variables in the user costs. The methodologies and approaches introduced herein can be easily implemented by practitioners and would be of benefit to pavement rehabilitations for steel suspension bridges.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to express their appreciation for the support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant NNSFC51078075, the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu under Grant BK2011611, and the Sustentation Fund for Young Teachers of Southeast University. The authors would also like to thank Zhang Hao from the Chongqing China-Communication Technology Co., Ltd. for the information and suggestions that she provided. The opinions expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsors.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Performance of Constructed Facilities
Volume 26 • Issue 1 • February 2012
Pages: 76 - 83
Copyright
© 2012 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Aug 18, 2010
Accepted: Dec 21, 2010
Published online: Dec 23, 2010
Published in print: Feb 1, 2012
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