A structural reliability approach for the management of heavy vehicle access on highway bridge networks

As larger, heavier, and more frequent heavy vehicles desire access to the road network, existing highway bridges often designed to lower notional traffic loads are the decisive factor in allowing such access. Current access decision-making is based on binary measures of safety for individual bridges that are usually subjective, uncertain, and as a result, conservative. With infrastructure funding often limited, optimised bridge utilisation is necessary. As explored in this thesis, such utilisation and rational decision-making is only achieved through probability-based frameworks providing objective measures of single bridge safety and overall bridge network risk, adopting structural reliability theory.