Abstract
Reliability analysis has been used to account for uncertainties and evaluate the risk of highway geometric-designs. Despite the existence of correlations between the input design-variables, the majority of the studies applying reliability-analysis have ignored their correlations. The objective of this paper is to quantify the influence of input design-variable correlations on reliability-based highway geometric-design. Three modes of failure are considered: insufficient-sight-distance, vehicle-skidding, and vehicle-rollover, for passenger cars and heavy trucks. A series-system reliability problem of the failure modes is used to account for the joint occurrence of the failure mechanisms. Results show that ignoring the correlations between input-variables can lead to inaccurate estimation of the noncompliance probability for both the individual modes and the series-system reliability. The effect is more pronounced for the vehicle-skidding failure mode than the other modes. The input-variables' correlation significantly changes the multivariate distributions of the performance functions, leading to more extreme events in the failure domain.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).