Reliability of long span bridges based on design experience with the Honshu-Shikoku bridges

Most of the existing long span bridges were designed using deterministic concepts and methods. For example, all the seventeen long span bridges constructed in Japan by the Honshu-Shikoku Bridge Authority between Honshu Island and Shikoku Island including ten suspension bridges, five cable-stayed bridges, one arch bridge, and one truss bridge were designed based on the allowable stress design method. Today, it is generally recognized that bridge design, maintenance, and management must be made in the presence of uncertainties arising from inherent randomness, imperfect modelling, lack of experience, and lack of data. Therefore, the development of cost-effective maintenance and management strategies for long span bridges requires their condition assessment to be based on a system reliability approach implemented in a probabilistic finite element geometrically nonlinear elastic analysis. Such an approach has been recently developed by the authors. In this paper, a brief history of the Honshu-Shikoku bridges is presented, experience with extreme loading design specifications for these bridges is reported, and some aspects related to the system reliability approach proposed recently by the authors for long span bridges are reviewed. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.