An Automated Procedure for Assessing Local Reliability Index and Life-Cycle Cost of Alternative Girder Bridge Design Solutions

Stakeholders of civil infrastructures have to usually choose among several design alternatives in order to select a final design representing the best trade-off between safety and economy, in a life-cycle perspective. In this framework, the paper proposes an automated procedure for the estimation of life-cycle repair costs of different bridge design solutions. The procedure provides the levels of safety locally guaranteed by the selected design solution and the related total life-cycle cost. The method is based on the finite element modeling of the bridge and uses design traffic models as suggested by international technical standards. Both the global behavior and the transversal cross section of the bridge are analyzed in order to provide local reliability indexes. Several parameters involved in the design, such as geometry and loads and materials’ characteristics, are considered as uncertain. Degradation models are adopted for steel carpentry and rebars. The application of the procedure to a road bridge case study shows its potential in providing local safety levels for different limit states over the entire lifetime of the bridge and the life-cycle cost of the infrastructure, highlighting the importance of the local character of the life-cycle cost analysis