Use of Traffic Data in Bridge Assessment an IABSE Initiative

Abstract

The bridge community is committed into creating safe and sustainable structures for future generations. During the drafting work of bridge design standards many compromises are needed to achieve a consensus, and the resulting design verifications developed can be seen as the best commonly agreed practice and a way to achieve safe structures. However, there is inherent conservatism in developed generations of standards.

Decision makers and road administrations, often due to lack of expertise, are very careful in adopting new methods developed by the scientific community, and often the route from research to practice is tediously long.

This paper outlines general concepts on how actual traffic load conditions monitored on site can be integrated into assessment of capacity of bridge structures. Often different experts are dealing with these very different sub-fields of structural engineering; hence the community is in dire need of tools bringing relevant knowledge together, allowing a holistic view of the problem in hand.

New assessment tools should be developed to get relevant and trustworthy background information to support calibration of current and future design standards, and also to form a basis for realistic site-specific load determination for existing bridges. A transparent, open, and commonly agreed basis for conducting the loading and capacity evaluation would accelerate research and give more continuity by allowing the passing of current best knowledge to the next research generations of bridge engineering as well as to practitioners.

The paper presents the work of the newly formed International Association of Bridge and Structural Engineers (IABSE) Task Group focused on the utilisation of traffic data in research, design and assessment of bridges. The objectives of the group are highlighted along with areas of proposed research and preliminary findings.