Beyond Statistical Fitting: Improving Reliability Analysis through Physically Consistent Bridge Traffic Load Model
Presented in ICOSSAR25 (2025), Los Angeles, USA.
| Paper | Slides |
Existing literature on bridge traffic load distributions can predict loading beyond what is physically impossible. For example, it is possible to predict load larger than a truck fully loaded with Osmium, the densest stable element there is. How could this be? This presentation proposes a method to prevent impossible loading from being predicted. We urge that future research properly consider the physical nature of the problem being modelled, and goes beyond just chasing some goodness-of-fit, predictive power, or other metrics when proposing a statistical model.
