APPLICATION OF RELIABILITY-ANALYSIS IN BRIDGE MANAGEMENT

This paper describes the use of reliability analysis by the Highways A gency of the Department of Transport, United Kingdom, in developing va rious aspects of its bridge management procedures. There have been pio neering use of the technique for developing the whole life assessment of bridges, bridge and traffic assessment loading criteria and load hi story based assessment rules. The paper also discusses certain fundame ntal issues that have come to the force during these developments, suc h as minimum acceptable safety level, economic safety levels, how to d eal with bridges which are not amenable to calculation based assessmen t and the management of sub-standard bridges. (C) 1998 Published by El sevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.