Reliability Analysis for Serviceability Limit State of Bridges Concerning Deflection Criteria

Serviceability limit state (SLS) refers to the condition under which a system (structure) is still considered functional and serviceable. The main contribution of this study is to develop a procedure to perform the reliability analysis for steel girder bridge deflections due to vehicular loading with the consideration of the serviceability limit state (service level II) according to the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (ASSHO) load and resistance factor design (LRFD) of bridge specifications. In order to achieve this, the statistical parameters (mean and standard deviation of the bridge deflections) are updated based on the available weigh-in-motion (WIM) data (from several states across the United States) at different lifetimes. Two state-of-the-art new approaches are introduced to determine the time-dependent statistical parameters; one of them is related to the probability papers and the other is related to the probability space (which is defined in this paper). Eventually, by taking advantage of the updated statistical parameters of the bridge deflections, the reliability analysis is performed to determine the target reliability for SLS, which was implicitly considered by AASHTO LRFD bridge specifications.