Seismic Reliability Assessment of Bridges with User-Defined System Failure Events
Publication: Journal of Engineering Mechanics
Volume 137, Issue 10
Abstract
Bridge-level failure event definitions per limit state have evolved from failure of one key bridge component as representative of the whole bridge system to failure of at least one of multiple components. However, an entire set of bridge failure event possibilities exists between these two extremes in the same limit state, such as failure of any two, any three, or any desired subset of bridge components. This paper proposes a closed-form combinatorial method to evaluate all possible ways in which bridge components can fail within and across limit states. It also highlights bridge component importance measures as key by-products of the closed-form solution. Calculations are illustrated with a particular yet illustrative system failure event, called the augmented event, which incorporates failures of at least one component in a given limit state and joint failures of multiple important components in a previous limit state. Bridges in as-built and retrofitted conditions are used to illustrate the augmentation calculation under seismic loads and the application of the proposed system reliability method. The results reveal an increase in median system fragility at the moderate limit states in the range of 4–20% relative to traditional approaches that neglect augmentation. This methodology to connect bridge components to bridge system reliability can readily support infrastructure stakeholder decision making and risk management through an efficient approach that can adapt to evolving system failure event definitions.
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Acknowledgments
The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the National Science Foundation through grants NSFCMMI-0748231 and NSFCMMI-0928493 and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Rice University.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Engineering Mechanics
Volume 137 • Issue 10 • October 2011
Pages: 680 - 690
Copyright
© 2011 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Dec 15, 2009
Accepted: May 16, 2011
Published online: May 18, 2011
Published in print: Oct 1, 2011
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