Ship bridge collision in river traffic, analysis and design practice

Collisions of ships with bridges crossing navigable inland waterways can injure the load bearing capacity of bridges and become a threat to the bridge users. A deterministic design practice for bridges has been improved towards advanced analysis of the ship bridge collision problem. The accident scenario is described by a mathematical model so as to estimate the collision probability. The analysis of ship accidents and especially ship bridge collisions gives an insight in influencing and weighting factors. Investigations concerning impact deformations of ships and barges enable to evaluate a realistic dynamic impact load. The combination of the probability of ship bridge collision and the probability of the impact load results in a ship impact distribution function where the collision load is referred to an exceedance probability. By this distribution function a design load can be estimated in a probabilistic way.