DESIGN OF COMPOSITE HYBRID PLATE GIRDER BRIDGES BASED ON RELIABILITY AND OPTIMIZATION

A practical and efficient reliability-based optimization approach to the design of both unstiffened and stiffened composite hybrid plate girders for highway bridges is presented. The steel weight of the built up plate girder is adopted as the objective to be minimized and all constraints specified in the AASHTO bridge code are considered in the optimization process. The solution is obtained by coupling an optimization program with a reliability analysis program. Numerical examples illustrate the application of the approach to reliability-based optimum design of unstiffened and stiffened composite plate girders. Sensitivity analyses are also performed for finding the rates of change of the optimum solution with respect to changes in problem preassigned parameters.