On the Upper Bound of the Distribution of Bridge Traffic Loading

Akbar Rizqiansyah and Colin C. Caprani (Under review), Reliability Engineering and System Safety

This work argues that bridge traffic loading probability models should be bounded. A method based on Bayesian statistics incorporating the physical boundedness of traffic and limits based on engineering information is proposed. Diagnostic tools to detect misspecified engineering information are developed. Common causes of supposed observations of unbounded traffic load distributions in the literature are presented. The approach demonstrates a reduction in lifetime load estimation uncertainty and avoidance of physically impossible results, compared to the conventional unbounded bridge traffic load model.