Human error impact in structural safety of a reinforced concrete bridge

Abstract

The economic and social losses due to increasing bridges collapse over the years have underlined the importance of the development of more robust bridge structural systems when exposed to harmful events, such as natural hazards, human-made hazards and human errors. Natural and human-made hazards are usually explicitly addressed in the numerous works available in the literature, but when it comes to human errors, very few studies can be found. It is worth mentioning that human errors have been identified as one of the main causes of bridges failure. Consequently, the main goal of this paper is the assessment of human errors impact on the robustness and safety of a prestressed reinforced concrete bridge through a probabilistic-based approach. Uncertainties concerning the numerical model, material strength, geometry and loading condition are used as key input parameters for the probabilistic assessment. Considering the structural system performance in its early days (i.e., virgin reliability index) the human error impact in structural safety is measured according to the structural system performance reduction given different errors with different magnitudes. Therefore, the structural system ability to maintain acceptable levels of performance, given such errors, is assessed.

Keywords:

• Bridge failure
• human error
• robustness analysis
• probabilistic assessment
• non-linear structural analysis
• reliability of structures
• structural safety
• uncertainties

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Table 1. Concrete main parameters.

Table 2. Reinforcement main parameters.

Additional information

Funding

This research was developed at the University of Minho in close cooperation with the following entities: Adão da Fonseca, COST Action TU 1406, GEG, HDP, IABSE, Portuguese Infrastructures, Mota Engil and Soares da Costa. This work was partly financed by: (i) FEDER funds through the Competitivity Factors Operational Programme (COMPETE) and by national funds through the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) within the scope of project POCI 01 0145 FEDER 007633; (ii) national funds through FCT - Foundation for Science and Technology, under grant agreement “PD/BD/143003/2018” attributed to the 1st author; and (iii) FCT/MCTES through national funds (PIDDAC) under the R&D Unit Institute for Sustainability and Innovation in Structural Engineering (ISISE), under reference UIDB/04029/2020.