Optimal maintenance planning for bridge structures considering earthquake effects

In the design of bridge structures, it is evident that the most important is to acquire their safety. However, there is a limitation to increase the safety because of the financial constraint. Especially, the reduction of construction cost is quite desirable under the severe economic condition in Japan. Recently, Life-Cycle Cost (LCC) analysis has been paid attention as a possible and promising concept to achieve a rational maintenance program. In this study, a stochastic model of structural response is proposed, which accounts for the variation due to the uncertain characteristics of earthquakes, and the probability of failure is calculated based on the reliability theory. Using the failure probability, LCC can be calculated for the bridge structure with earthquake excitations.