Sensitivities In Repair Cost And Repair Time Metrics For Seismic Bridge Response

Post-earthquake repair costs and repair times are important for evaluating the performance of bridges in a fundamentally different way than the traditional component-level metrics such as bearing displacements and column ductility demands. Repair costs and times are metrics that address the system-level response of bridges to a suite of seismic events, especially when cast probabilistically in the form of fragility curves. As with any vulnerability assessment that is comprised of numerous components, each with their own individual vulnerability, there is a potential for greater uncertainty in the resulting system-level metrics, or conflicting contributions from different components to obscure the principal importance measures in the process. A typical multi-span reinforced concrete highway overpass bridge in California is used to investigate sensitivity of the probabilistic repair cost and time metrics to changes in repair quantities, unit costs, production rates, and correlation at the demand and damage levels. Results show the definition of the discrete damage states and the uncertainties in certain repair quantities and production rates to be critical parameters. © 2010 ASCE