Real-time reliability assessment based on acceleration monitoring for bridge

Bridge health monitoring (BHM) has become increasingly significant in the life-cycle of the structure such as maintenance, repair and rehabilitation. It is necessary to use BHM information efficiently to assess the working conditions of the bridge. The main objective of this study is to develop an effective method and establish a framework for the real-time reliability assessment based on BHM acceleration information. The first-passage probability and its further development have been proposed to assess the reliability probability. The first-passage probability shows the probability of that a scalar process exceeds a designated threshold during a given time interval. The advantage of the proposed method is the assessment of the real-time reliability probability based on the monitoring information during an assessment reference period. Furthermore, the velocity data and displacement data are calculated from the acceleration monitoring data using the relationships between their power spectral density (PSD) functions. The real-time reliability assessment of Donghai Bridge, which is the first large scale cross-sea bridge in China, demonstrates that the proposed method is efficient and effective.