Fragility analysis for highway bridges in Taiwan

This paper presents the methods developed to enhance the transportation lifelines module in HAZ-Taiwan for highway bridges. The objective of this paper is to define the bridge classification and provide the fragility functions of the North-South Freeway in Taiwan that by utilize the available investigation data. The organization of this paper is as follows. First, the available bridge classes of the North-South freeway in Taiwan are reviewed and a new classification based on the available data to be implemented in Haz-Taiwan is proposed. Second, the description of failure mechanisms and criteria in different damage states adopted in this research are summarized. Third, the theoretical methodology of the fragility analysis for the new bridge classes and examples for freeway bridges are presented. Parameters for describing the fragility functions for each class are also generated and shown in the paper.