This series includes technical reports prepared by faculty, students and staff who are associated with the John A. Blume Earthquake Engineering Center at Stanford University. While the primary focus of Blume Center is earthquake engineering, many of the reports in this series encompass broader topics in structural engineering and materials, computational mechanics, geomechanics, structural health monitoring, and engineering life-cycle risk assessment. Each report includes acknowledgments of the specific sponsors for the report and underlying research. In addition to providing research support, the Blume Center provides administrative support for maintaining and disseminating the technical reports. For more information about the Blume Center and its activities, see https://blume.stanford.edu.
This report presents a prioritization method developed for seismic retrofitting of bridges. The method is used to identify bridges that are in most need of retrofitting and rank order these bridges based on the vulnerability and importance criteria.
Vulnerability assessment includes evaluation of the seismic hazard at the bridge site, classification of existing bridges into bridge classes and fragility analysis. Vulnerability is expressed as a function of seismicity in order to capture the direct effect of ground motion on damage. New bridge classes are defined based on the proposition that bridges with similar structural characteristics will experience similar damage under a given seismic loading. An expert system is developed to classify bridges into bridge classes. The need for the development of fragility curves for each bridge class is emphasized.
Importance assessment considers the attributes that relate the consequences of failure of a bridge to the public safety and socio-economic well-being of a community. The importance of a bridge is conceived to be closely related to its function within the transportation network system. Network analysis is used to evaluate the emergency response factor that assesses the impact of disruption of the available routes or the time delays due to destroyed components after an earthquake. A value model is developed to properly determine the multi-attribute importance criterion that depends on the decision maker and his or her objectives. The developed value model is also used to integrate the vulnerability and importance criteria.
A detailed review and critique of the existing prioritization methodologies is included. The developed methodology is illustrated by an example application conducted for the Palo Alto, California area.
Basöz, NI and Kiremidjian, AS. (1995). Prioritization of Bridges for Seismic Retrofitting. John A. Blume Earthquake Engineering Center Technical Report 114. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: http://purl.stanford.edu/cd328tx7105
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