Decision analysis for elevating bridge decks with steel pedestals

Abstract

Steel pedestals have been proposed to elevate bridge decks to reduce the likelihood of collisions of overheight vehicles. However, the use of steel pedestals might also increase the bridge vulnerability to seismic events. This paper develops a formulation for decision analysis for elevating bridges with steel pedestals. The formulation accounts for the expected life-cycle costs (LCCs) associated with vehicular impacts to bridge decks and seismic events. The optimum height of the steel pedestals is then obtained by minimising the total expected costs. The expected LCC associated with a bridge retrofitted with the optimum pedestal height is compared with that of the same bridge before the installation of the steel pedestals to determine whether elevating the bridge with steel pedestals is justifiable. The proposed framework is applied on a typical two-span slab-on-girder bridge at different locations in the USA.

Keywords::

• benefit analysis
• bridges
• safety and hazards
• life-cycle cost
• whole life costing
• risk and probability analysis

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge the Texas A&M Supercomputing Facility (http://www.sc.tamu.edu/) for providing computing resources useful in conducting the research reported in this paper.

Notes

^1. Email: [email protected]

^2. Email: [email protected]