Probabilistic-based nonlinear analysis of a reinforced concrete railway bridge

The safety evaluation of structures comprises several factors to assess their condition state. However, the global safety of structures cannot be reached at all because there are many uncertainties sources. Due to all these uncertainties, the wisest way to deal with this problem is to assume all of these uncertainties as random variables and perform a reliability analysis, which is a probabilistic analysis, in order to obtain a reliability index that can give the structure condition. This paper presents the nonlinear analysis of an existent reinforced concrete railway bridge, with DIANA software. The developed model will be used in a probabilistic based approach in order to obtain a global reliability index, which is then compared with a threshold value in order to evaluate the bridge condition.