Quality control of roadway bridges – Reliability assessment

Abstract

The elaboration of adequate quality control plans is one of the crucial tasks in bridge management today. This is the topic of the ongoing COST TU1406 action, where it is proposed to control quality focus by means of key performance indicators. To this date, the qualitative methodology for the assessment of the indicators is suggested, with a framework that can be upgraded to a full quantitative approach in future. The methodology is envisioned to enhance current management practices, which predominantly rely on visual inspections, and use only the essential data from bridge inventory and inspections for decision-making. The pivotal key performance indicator is suggested to be reliability, the assessment of which is performed for likely bridge failure modes. Here, it is required to include the impact of physical features (e.g. damages, symptoms) observed in inspections, especially those which may considerably affect the reliability. The two approaches suggested within COST Working Group 3 report to assess the reliability and the possibilities for their application in practice are presented in this paper.