Innovative bridge assessment for developing countries

Abstract

Reliability based bridge assessment has become a standard way of assessing bridges in developed countries across Europe, North America and Australia. Through clever collection of load and resistance data, design parameters can be quantified with greater accuracy. By applying the principles of structural reliability, bridges can be assessed less conservatively, implying that more bridges can be treated at the same cost of a conservative code-based assessment. This paper presents some innovative assessment methods which have been developed elsewhere with the aim to expose local bridge engineers to the available techniques and to motivate how they can be applied locally