A realistic resistance deterioration model for time-dependent reliability analysis of aging bridges

Abstract

Bridge resistance and reliability may deteriorate with time due to aggressive environmental conditions and increasing road freight volumes, resulting in an increase of potential economic loss. This is thus a great concern to decision-makers managing the bridges’ continued future service. Reasonable models of bridge resistance and applied loads are the fundamentals of accurate estimation/prediction of a bridge’s serviceability. In this paper, a new model for resistance deterioration is proposed, which enables the non-increasing property and auto-correlation in the stochastic deterioration process to be incorporated. To facilitate the practical application of the model, methods to determine its parameters using obtained data on structural resistance are developed and illustrated through simple numerical examples. Time-dependent reliability analysis is conducted using the proposed resistance deterioration model based on Monte Carlo simulation, and the effect of auto-correlation in the deterioration process on structural time-dependent reliability is investigated.