Reliability-Based Safety Assessment of Bridge Members on Monitored Live Load Effects

For decades, monitoring concepts for structural systems have been subjected to a rapid development process. They have become more and more important in the intervention planning (e.g., maintenance, repair) on new and existing structures. Nevertheless, there is still a strong need for the efficient use of structural monitoring data in the reliability assessment. In an extended sense, structural monitoring can be considered similar to quality assurance and acceptance sampling, since it is not practically possible to continuously monitor all performance indicators in all critical sections of an entire structural system. The aim of this paper is two-fold: (a) the probability density of strain of sensor locations based on the monitoring data was researched; and (b) to shift the reliability index to the differentiation value. An illustration of the proposed approach is provided on Hongdao Bay Bridge located in Qingdao, China. The monitoring system has been working since 2011.