Effect of Common Cause Failures on Indirect Costs

Abstract

Next generation bridge management systems will take into consideration multiple hazard scenarios and not only traffic loading and structural deterioration as they do now. The indirect costs used in these bridge management systems to determine optimal management strategies vary according to the hazard scenarios considered. The difference depends on whether or not the bridge failures are due to a common cause, such as a single flood or earthquake, or due to load events that may be considered statistically unrelated, such as truck loads. To illustrate the effect of common cause bridge failures on indirect costs, two examples are presented that treat the failures first as if they are due to statistically independent loading events and then as if they are due to a common cause. To examine the effect of bridge failures on indirect costs of the system, estimation is performed at the network level. The first example, on a simple network, shows the indirect cost estimate for all of the network condition states. The second example, on a complex network, shows the difference in the possible reduction of total indirect costs with a single bridge intervention as well as the change in intervention sequence. The main conclusions are that total indirect costs and optimal intervention sequences differ depending on whether or not bridge failures are due to a common cause, and that the largest changes in indirect cost estimation occur when simultaneously failed bridges affect the method of indirect cost incurrence.