TABLE OF CONTENTS MICHEL GHOSN
Department of Givil Engineering
The City College of New York/CUNY
New York, NY 10031, USA
E-mail: ghosn@ccny.cuny.edu
Structural reliability theory has been used for several years to account for the uncertainties associated with estimating bridge load capacity and the applied loads during the calibration of safety factors for bridge design and evaluation specifications. The emphasis has been on evaluating the members on an individual basis and ignoring their interaction as a structural system. Although the existing approach has worked well in providing society with safe bridges, recent trends in structural design have focused on developing performance-based engineering methods that take into consideration the whole system's response range. Such a new approach, which would more accurately represent the behavior of bridge structures, requires the application of system reliability techniques. The purpose of this chapter is to illustrate the applicability of reliability methods for the safety assessment of bridge components as well as systems.
The aim of structural reliability theory is to account for the uncertainties encountered while evaluating the safety of structural systems or during the calibration of load and resistance factors for structural design codes. The concepts are applicable for any type of structure and in particular to highway bridge structures.
The uncertainties associated with predicting the load carrying capacity of a structure, the intensities of the loads expected to be applied, and the effects of these loads may be represented by random variables. The value that a random variable can take is described by a...
