Seismic assessment, maintenance and management of Taiwan highway bridges

Since Taiwan is located in a seismic hazard region, the seismic assessment, management and maintenance and retrofit of older bridges is very important. In order to ensure the safety of traffic network, a project has been carried out to assess the seismic capacity of over 2,300 bridges on the Taiwan Highway System. The assessment process is divided into two stages. The first stage is the preliminary assessment which all the bridges will be evaluated using a simple seismic review sheet to determine the evaluation points. On the second stage, 116 bridges are selected to perform the detail analysis. The state-of-the-art nonlinear static analysis (pushover analysis) is adopted to calculate the seismic capacity of the bridge. Based on the assessment results, the retrofit strategy and retrofit scheme are established. The seismic loss assessment and economic benefit evaluation are done to confirm the needs of seismic retrofit. This paper will illustrate the assessment process and introduce the project results.