Paper Title: Uncertainty analysis and impact on seismic life-cycle cost assessment of highway bridge structures

Shivang Shekhar, & Jayadipta Ghosh

2018-10-31

Uncertainty is ubiquitous in all sorts of modeling and experimental processes in science and engineering. Current research in seismic loss estimation considers the ground motion, material and structural modeling parameter, deterioration parameters, component repair strategies and its associated cost as individual random variables and propagates their uncertainty to estimate expected seismic life-cycle cost and associated confidence bounds. However, the quantification of each source of uncertainty towards total uncertainty is unknown. In addition to the total uncertainty in seismic losses, this study evaluates the contribution of individual sources of uncertainty to the losses for a case-study bridge located in Central and Southeastern US. The observed range of uncertainties from certain sources indicate the necessity for error quantification for seismic vulnerability and loss assessment of highway bridges for decision