Development of Uncertainty-Based Life-Cycle Cost System for Railroad Bridges

불확실성을 고려한 철도 교량의 LCC분석 시스템 개발

Recently, the demand on the practical application of life-cycle cost effectiveness for design and rehabilitation of civil infrastructure is rapidly growing unprecedentedly in civil engineering practice. Accordingly, it is expected that the life-cycle cost in the 21st century will become a new paradigm for all engineering decision problems in practice. However, in spite of impressive progress in the researches on the LCC, so far, most researches in Koreahave only focused on roadway bridges, which are not applicable to railway bridges. Thus, this paper presents the formulation models and methods for uncertainty-based LCCA for railroad bridges consideringboth objective statistical data available in the agency database of railroad bridges management and subjective data obtained form interviews with experts of the railway agency, which are used to anew uncertainty-based expected maintenance/repair costs including lifetime indirect costs. For reliable assessment of the life-cycle maintenance/repair costs, statistical analysis considering maintenance history data and survey data including the subjective judgments of railway experts on maintenance/management of railroad bridges, are performed to categorize critical maintenance items and associated expected costs and uncertainty-based deterioration models are developed. Finally, the formulation for simulation-based LCC analysis of railway bridges with uncertainty-based deterioration models are applied to the design-decision problem, which is to select an optimal bridge type having minimum Life-Cycle cost among various railway bridges types such as steel plate girder bridge, and prestressed concrete girder bridge in the basic design phase.