• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.26 no.6A
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• pp.965-976
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• 2006

A realistic lifetime seismic-reliability based approach is unavoidable to perform Life-Cycle Cost (LCC)-effective optimum design, maintenance, and retrofitting of structures against seismic risk. So far, though a number of researchers have proposed the LCC-based seismic design and retrofitting methodologies, most researchers have only focused on the methodological point. Accordingly, in most works, they have not been quantitatively considered critical factors such as the effects of seismic retrofit, maintenance, and environmental stressors on lifetime seismic reliability assessment of deteriorating structures. Thus, in this study, a systemic lifetime seismic reliability analysis methodology is proposed and a program HPYER-DRAIN2DX-DS is developed to perform the desired lifetime seismic reliability analysis. To demonstrate the applicability of the program, it is applied to an example bridge with or without seismic retrofit and maintenance strategies. From the numerical investigation, it may be positively stated that HYPER-DRAIN2DX-DS can be utilized as a useful numerical tool for LCC-effective optimum seismic design, maintenance, and retrofitting of bridges.

• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.28 no.6C
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• pp.321-329
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• 2008

In this study, a series of column test as a way in order to make up for the weakness point of the conventional acceleration method were conducted to both propose the suction board drain method and grapes the specific improvement character of this method as a result of a sort of plastic drain board and a phase of vacuum pressure conditions. On this occasion, the study focused on computing the effective factors of the fittest Suction board drain method affected by each condition through confirming the settlement generated during the test, the water content reduction and stress increase effect occurred arising from the test, and the ratio of consolidation related to the improvement period. In accordance with the shape of core and that whether the core is attached to the filter(pocket or adhesion), the castle type of adhesion and the column type of pocket are more efficient than the others as a consequence of the test to find out the improvement effect depending on each drainage such as a castle type, coil type, harmonica type, column type of pocket and a castle of the adhesion. In case of the step suction pressure, the shorter the period of $-0.8\;kg/cm^2$ as a final step of the suction pressure is, the better the improvement is. In addition, the correlation between degree of consolidation per each suction pressure level and duration of application was drawn as a curve and the point of inflection on this curve was provided to determine the duration period to maximize the consolidation.

• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.28 no.6D
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• pp.775-789
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• 2008

The Office for Government Policy Coordination announced in 2006, september that a scheme of pre-signal would show remarkable outcome to reduce traffic accidents. Therefore, the Ministry recommended applying preferentially the pre-signal scheme to enhancement projects for high accident frequency areas. In case that the suggested pre-signal was unilaterally introduced to the enhancement projects at intersections, it might rather cause a big trial and error in terms of traffic safety. Hence, on the basis of quantitative analysis, this study was to indicate a pre-signal's effectiveness to reduce the traffic accidents, to illustrate a trend of the accident type due to the pre-signal, and to introduce intersection type that could be appropriate for the pre-signal. The methodology adopted Comparison-Group Method which was developed by Hauer. Through this methodology, overall effectiveness to reduce the accidents is considered positive but individual effectiveness by intersection and by accident case was different. All cases of the accidents at small scale intersection demonstrated positive results to reduce its accidents, while in case of frontal collision and side-right angle collision out of the accident types, the installation of pre-signal rather caused a negative result increasing the accident in terms of the traffic safety. I hope that this study would be a useful reference for future development of the estimation of accident effectiveness. Thus, when the pre-signal is being installed in the big intersection, it is recommended operating the installation concerning carefully improvements about muliple aspects as traffic operation, traffic facility, human factor etc.

• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.28 no.6D
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• pp.881-893
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• 2008

The major objective of this study is to investigate the fatigue damage factor evaluation of immovability crossing for railway turnout by the field test and qualitative analysis. From the field test results of the servicing turnout crossing and qualitative analysis with frictional wear which section stiffness decreased, it was evaluated fatigue life of servicing turnout crossing. Most design practices have not taken advantage of the advanced theories in the modern fracture mechanics and finite element analysis due to complexity of analysis as well as the large quantity of vaguely defined parameters in actual designs. This paper considers fatigue problems in turnout crossing using effective analytical and design tools from the field of qualitative constraint reasoning. A set of software modules was developed for fatigue analysis and evaluation, which is easily applicable in engineering practices of designers. The techniques enable the use complex analysis formulations to tackle practical problems with uncertainties, and present the design outcome in two-dimensional design space solution. Appropriate engineering assumptions and judgments in carrying out these procedures, often the most difficult part for practicing engineers, can be partially produced by using qualitative reasoning to define the trends and ranges, interval constraint analysis to derive the controlling parameters, as well as design space to account for practical experience.

• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.29 no.6D
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• pp.761-770
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• 2009

The energy efficiency and environment-friendly aspect of the railway system would be superior to other on-land ransportation systems. In a preliminary feasibility study stage and selection of optimal railway route, the energy efficiency and problems related to environment are usually considered. For the selection of optimal railway route, geographical features and facility of management are generally considered. Environment effect factors for the selection of environment-friendly railway router are focused and studied in this paper. In this study, various analysis of opinion of specialists (railway, environment, transport, urban planning, survey) and the guideline for construction of environment-friendly railway were accomplished. From these results of various analysis, 7 major categories (topography/geology, flora and fauna, Nature Property, air quality, water quality, noise/vibration, visual impact/cultural assets) were extracted. To select environment friendly railway route, many alternatives should be compared optimal route must be selected by a comprehensive assessment considering these 7 categories. To solve this problem, the selected method was AHP which simplifies the complex problems utilizing hierarchy, quantifying qualitative problems through 1:1 comparison, and extracting objective conclusions by maintaining consistency. As a result, a GUIbased program was developed which provides basic values of weighted parameters of each category defined by specialists, and a quantification of detailed assessment guidelines to ensures consistency.

• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.28 no.6A
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• pp.765-778
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• 2008

Performance Profiles are essential to predict the performance variation over time for the bridge management system (BMS) based on risk management. In general, condition profiles based on experts opinion and/or visual inspection records have been used widely because obtaining profiles based on real performance is not easy. However, those condition profiles usually don't give a good consistency to the safety of bridges, causing practical problems for the effective bridge management. The accuracy of performance evaluation is directly related to the accuracy of BMS. The reliability of the evaluation is important to produce the optimal solution for distributing maintenance budget reasonably. However, conventional methods of bridge assessment are not suitable for a more sophisticated decision making procedure. In this study, a method to compute quantitative performance profiles has been proposed to overcome the limitations of those conventional models. In Bridge Management Systems, the main role of performance profiles is to compute and predict the performance of bridges subject to lifetime activities with uncertainty. Therefore, the computation time for obtaining an optimal maintenance scenario is closely related to the efficiency of the performance profile. In this study, the Response Surface Method (RSM) based on independent and important design variables is developed for the rapid computation. Steel box bridges have been investigated because the number of independent design variables can be reduced significantly due to the high dependency between design variables.

• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.26 no.5D
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• pp.797-804
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• 2006

A development of regression model for asphalt concrete pavements using Falling Weight Deflectometer deflections is presented in this paper. A backcalculation program based on layered elastic theory was used to generate the synthetic modulus database, which was used to generate 95% confidence intervals of modulus in each layer. Using deflection basins of FWD data used in developing this procedure were collected from Pavement Management System in flexible pavements. Assumptions of back-calculation are that one is 3 layered flexible pavement structure and another is depth to bedrock is finite. It is found that difference of between 95% confidence intervals and modulus ranges of other papers does not exist. So, the data of 95% confidence intervals in each layer was used to develop multiple regression models. Multiple regression equations of each layer were established by SPSS, package of Statics analysis. These models were proved by regression diagnostics, which include case analysis, multi-collinearity analysis, influence diagnostics and analysis of variance. And these models have higher degree of coefficient of determination than 0.75. So this models were applied to predict modulus of domestic asphalt concrete pavement at FWD field test.

• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.26 no.4D
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• pp.649-659
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• 2006

Recently there has been huge efforts to improve performance in construction process by applying emerging techniques such as the Lean principle and Just-in-time concept. However, little achievement as we expected has come out in reality due to the lack of strategy to set a definite goal of the execution and differences of personal viewpoints on construction productivity. Accordingly, it is the most important to promote the circumstances for the construction process improvement by quantifying the goals of respective unit activity groups. This research explores feasible solutions for the improvement of construction projects performance by combining the six-sigma principle for the generic administrative innovation based on the idea of construction process performance. For this purpose, mutual comparisons of various current approaches are performed in an attempt to establish the advantages in applying six-sigma idea and to provide its fundamental strategy. Furthermore, through a case study with the simulation of applying six-sigma to a unit activity group in construction process, this paper verifies that the overall performance improves as the degree of sigma level gets advanced.

• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.26 no.4B
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• pp.389-398
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• 2006

The present study compositely applied the self-organizing map (SOM), which is a kind of artificial neural networks (ANNs), and the back propagation algorithm (BPA) for the rainfall-runoff prediction model taking account of the irregular variation of the spatiotemporal distribution of rainfall. To solve the problems from the previous studies on ANNs, such as the overestimation of low flow during the dry season, the underestimation of runoff during the flood season and the persistence phenomenon, in which the predicted values continuously represent the preceding runoffs, we introduced SOM theory for the preprocessing in the prediction model. The theory is known that it has the pattern classification ability. The method proposed in the present research initially includes the classification of the rainfall-runoff relationship using SOM and the construction of the respective models according to the classification by SOM. The individually constructed models used the data corresponding to the respectively classified patterns for the runoff prediction. Consequently, the method proposed in the present study resulted in the better prediction ability of runoff than that of the past research using the usual application of ANNs and, in addition, there were no such problems of the under/over-estimation of runoff and the persistence.

• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.26 no.6B
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• pp.597-603
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• 2006

The purpose of this study is to improve the short term rainfall forecast skill using neural network model that can deal with the non-linear behavior between satellite data and ground observation, and minimize the flood damage. To overcome the geographical limitation of Korean peninsula and get the long forecast lead time of 3 to 6 hour, the developed rainfall forecast model took satellite imageries and wide range AWS data. The architecture of neural network model is a multi-layer neural network which consists of one input layer, one hidden layer, and one output layer. Neural network is trained using a momentum back propagation algorithm. Flood was estimated using rainfall forecasts. We developed a dynamic flood inundation model which is associated with 1-dimensional flood routing model. Therefore the model can forecast flood aspect in a protected lowland by levee failure of river. In the case of multiple levee breaks at main stream and tributaries, the developed flood inundation model can estimate flood level in a river and inundation level and area in a protected lowland simultaneously.