An experience of practical reliability-based safety assessment and capacity rating

Nowadays, reliability-based methods have been widely used for the safety and capacity rating of deteriorated and/or damaged bridges. This paper is intended to suggest practical reliability-based assessment models and methods for the safety assessment and capacity rating of various kinds of actual existing bridges. And the application of recently developed a new approach, called equivalent system-strength, for reliability-based capacity rating is illustrated using the data obtained from actual bridges. This paper also summarizes various approaches to reliability-based safety assessment and capacity rating, and investigates their application to various existing aged bridges. It will be systematically shown that the proposed bridge reliability models and methods could be effectively used in practice for the safety assessment and capacity rating of existing old bridges in conjunction with static and dynamic field load tests, nondestructive tests, and visual inspections.