System reliability study on a single-span composite bridge

The bridge assessment process can benefit from the development and application of system reliability techniques, which take into account the system behaviour, and redundancy in the structure. Currently bridge assessments are performed mainly on a component level, while the recent introduction of five levels of assessments in the UK allows the use of increasingly more refined and less conservative techniques to be applied as required. The response surface method in conjunction with non-linear finite element analysis is used in this paper, and the validity of proposed method has been examined through the computation of system reliability of a single-span composite bridge.