Redundancy and member importance evaluation of highway bridges

When analyzing bridges, reliability is often considered with respect to individual components only. This approach can be under- or over-conservative. For this reason, a system reliability-based approach is necessary. This study provides a system approach for evaluating the redundancy and reliability importance of members in highway bridges. Both idealized systems (such as series, parallel, and series-parallel models) and an existing highway bridge are used to exemplify the system approach.