Simplified Risk-Targeted Performance-Based Seismic Design Method for Ordinary Standard Bridges

Abstract This paper presents the formulation of a comprehensive risk-targeted performance-based seismic design (PBSD) framework involving the seismic design of bridge piers for California Ordinary Standard Bridges (OSBs), facilitating risk-informed design and decision making in the face of uncertainty. A full-fledged implementation of this all-inclusive design method formulated by retaining the inherent rigor of the underlying seismic performance assessment methodology might impose a seemingly prohibitive computational cost for the available resources in the current scenario of seismic bridge design practice. For reasons of practicability, the findings of the full-fledged design framework are inventively utilized to distill out a simplified and computationally more economical PBSD procedure. Its efficacy is validated using four already-built California testbed OSBs as cases in point. The proposed simplified design methodology is able to (1) find a design point in the primary design parameter space of a bridge to be designed for multiple risk-targeted performance objectives; and (2) delineate an approximate, yet sufficiently accurate, feasible design domain and identify the limit states controlling its boundary in the primary design parameter space of the bridge, at a computational cost significantly lower than that of the original method.