Incorporation of Seismic Considerations in Bridge Management Systems

The objective of this paper is to incorporate seismic hazard and risk analysis considerations, which are concerned with the occurrence of earthquakes and the vulnerability of structures, into bridge management systems. We develop a decision model for optimizing bridge maintenance, repair, and reconstruction (MR&R) policies that takes into account the occurrence of earthquake events. The model presented in this paper is not meant to be very detailed or comprehensive, but rather to allow us to obtain qualitative implications of including seismic considerations in bridge management systems. Based on four different case studies, we found that accounting for the probability of earthquake occurrence in a bridge MR&R decision-making model had a significant impact on the probability distribution of the bridge condition state, the optimal policies, and their total cost. Furthermore, we found that ignoring the probability of destruction due to earthquakes would lead to errors in budgeting.