Hierarchical Bayesian modeling of highway bridge network extreme traffic loading

Akbar Rizqiansyah and Colin C. Caprani (2024), Structural Safety.

Paper

This study proposes a hierarchical Bayesian model that can estimate the traffic load effect of multiple bridges simultaneously, and subsequently create predictions for the remaining (unexamined) bridges within the road network. The results show significant reductions in prediction uncertainties, better fits as measured by leave-one-out statistics, more robust fits against extremes, and the emergence of intuitive correlation structures between different bridges’ traffic loads that are absent in conventional models. This paper also presents a potential new strategy to reduce estimation uncertainty, and a method to predict parameters and return levels for bridges across an entire network made possible by the proposed hierarchical Bayesian model.