System Reliability Evaluation of Prefabricated RC Hollow Slab Bridges Considering Hinge Joint Damage Based on Modified AHP

Abstract

The prefabricated reinforced concrete (RC) hollow slab bridges, with the advantages of high quality, lower cost and shorter construction period, have been widely used for small-to-medium-span highway bridges in China. Because of environmental deterioration and traffic volume increases, the performance of the bridge system deteriorates gradually. Accurate bridge system evaluation can provide a reliable basis for maintenance and management. A bridge system is composed of multiple interrelated components, which makes the system reliability evaluation become a computationally intractable work. In this paper, an effective method was proposed to evaluate the system reliability of the prefabricated RC hollow slab bridge considering hinge joint damage based on the modified analytic hierarchy process (AHP). Considering the subjectivity of the traditional AHP method in constructing the judgment matrix, this paper proposed an objective construction method of the judgment matrix to modify the traditional AHP. The modified hinge plate method (MHPM) proposed by the previous research was utilized to analyze the effect of hinge joint damage on system reliability. In order to verify the applicability of the proposed system reliability evaluation method, a simply supported RC hollow slab bridge was selected as the case study and the system reliability indexes were compared with the traditional series and parallel methods. The results indicated that the traditional methods were either too conservative or too radical to objectively evaluate the actual system reliability level of the structure. In contrast, the proposed method in this paper was more suitable for evaluating the system reliability of such bridges, and more accurate in providing maintenance decision makers with a relatively reasonable bridge condition information.