Reliability-based Failure Cause Assessment of Collapsed Bridge during Construction

Abstract

Until now, in many forensic reports, the failure cause assessments are usually carried out by a deterministic approach so far. However, itmay be possible for the forensic investigation to lead to unreasonable results far from the real collapse scenario, because the deterministicapproach does not systematically take into account any information on the uncertainties involved in the failures of structures.Reliability-based failure cause assessment (reliability-based forensic engineering) methodology is developed which can incorporate theuncertainties involved in structural failures and structures, and to apply them to the collapsed bridge in order to identify the most criticalfailure scenario and find the cause that triggered the bridge collapse. Moreover, to save the time and cost of evaluation, an algorithm ofautomated event tree analysis (ETA) is proposed and possible to automatically calculate the failure probabilities of the failure events and theoccurrence probabilities of failure scenarios. Also, for reliability analysis, uncertainties are estimated more reasonably by using the Bayesianapproach based on the experimental laboratory testing data in the forensic report. For the applicability, the proposed approach is applied tothe Hang-ju Grand Bridge, which collapsed during construction, and compared with deterministic approach.q2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.