RELIABILITY-BASED OPTIMAL DESIGN CONSIDERING STRUCTURAL SYSTEM AND ITS APPLICATION TO EVALUATION OF SEISMIC PERFORMANCE OF RC BRIDGE PIER

Abstract

It is requested to switch over to a performance-based design system. In this paper design flow charts which can cope with an arbitrarily given safety level are formulated by reliability-based optimal theory considering structural system. Then the proposed method is applied to the seismic designs of rigid-frame bridge piers and RC bridge pier (single-column types) which are designed based on the current code to examine their seismic performance. As a result, it is confirmed that (1) the RC bridge piers so as to attain the prescribed reliability can be designed by the proposal method and (2) the safety of bridge piers, which are designed based on the current code, are not uniform.