• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.43 no.3
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• pp.397-411
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• 2023

The number of deteriorated bridges with a service period of more than 30 years has been rapidly increasing in Korea. Accordingly, the importance of advanced maintenance technologies through the predictions of age-induced deterioration degree, condition, and performance of bridges is more and more noticed. The prediction method of the safety grade of bridges was proposed in this study using the classification models of the Decision Tree and the Random Forest based on machine learning. As a result of analyzing these models for the 8,850 bridges located in national roads with various evaluation indexes such as confusion matrix, balanced accuracy, recall, ROC curve, and AUC, the Random Forest largely showed better predictive performance than that of the Decision Tree. In particular, random under-sampling in the Random Forest showed higher predictive performance than that of other sampling techniques for the C and D grade bridges, with the recall of 83.4%, which need more attention to maintenance because of the significant deterioration degree. The proposed model can be usefully applied to rapidly identify the safety grade and to establish an efficient and economical maintenance plan of bridges that have not recently been inspected.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.22 no.3
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• pp.36-43
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• 2021

Because bridges are major national infrastructure, regular safety inspections or diagnoses for bridges have been conducted in accordance with the "Special Act on the Safety and Maintenance of Facilities." Accordingly, the condition and safety assessments of the bridge are conducted to derive the condition and safety rating, respectively. A lower result is determined to be the safety grade of the bridge. In this study, the relationship between the condition rating and safety rating, which are the core of the bridge safety grade, was analyzed by the representative superstructure types of bridges, such as RC slab, PSCI girder, Steel box girder, Rhamen, and Preflex girder, to identify the correlation status and range between each rating. A reasonable improvement direction for establishing existing maintenance policies was suggested by proposing an alternative plan to change the proper implementation cycle of the inspection and diagnosis of bridge superstructure types. As a result of the research, it is necessary to adjust the inspection and diagnosis cycle according to the superstructure type and safety grade. In addition, maintenance policies need to be improved through detailed research on more diverse bridge types in the future.

• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.43 no.5
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• pp.543-553
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• 2023

This study was conducted to propose a simple method to evaluate the load-carrying capacity of RC slab bridges, which have been most frequently constructed in Korea. A number of RC slab bridges have been considerably deteriorated associate with the long service year. However, since these bridges are not included in the 1st and 2nd class infrastructures due to their short span length, they have been relatively neglected compared to other bridge types in terms of safety management. In the previous theoretical study, a process (draft) was proposed for evaluating the damage of RC slab bridges using the relationship between the displacement response ratio and the stiffness reduction rate derived by the measured displacement and natural frequency. In this paper, to verify the validity of the proposed damage evaluation process (draft), the results to the actual bridges were compared with the safety grade and the Matsui's deterioration index. In addition, to enhance the practical applicability of the existing process (draft), an improved method approximately evaluating the load-carrying capacity using only the measured natural frequency was presented. If an error of 10% of the load-carrying capacity is allowed, it is judged that the proposed damage evaluation process can be appropriately used not only for evaluating the safety of RC slab bridges, but also for determining priorities for their maintenance.

• Journal of the Korea institute for structural maintenance and inspection
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.67-74
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• 2021

This paper evaluated the structural safety of an aging PSC I-girder bridge with rebar corrosion in the deck. The geometry and rebar of the bridge were designed based on an actual PSC I-girder bridge, and the numerical analysis was performed considering the crack of concrete and yielding of steel rebar. According to the evaluation criteria of Korea Infrastructure Safety and Technology Corporation, this study defined two criteria of rebar exposure and corrosion rates to construct a total of 32 corrosion scenarios. Rebar exposure was defined as the exposure of tensile rebars in the bridge deck due to the removal of cover concrete. The results of the analysis showed that the safety and rating factors of the bridge decreased with increasing rebar exposure and corrosion rates. For the rebar corrosion rate more than 50%, the safety grade of the bridge should be carefully evaluated for all the rebar exposure rate. When the rebar corrosion rate exceeds 57%, the bridge was evaluated as E grade regardless of rebar exposure rate. A correlation analysis for a 2% of rebar exposure rate found that the bridge was evaluated as A grade up to 55.8% corrosion rate, C grade up to 56.9%, D grade up to 58.5%, and E grade for corrosion rate greater than 58.5%. This study indicates the necessity of a quantitative evaluation of rebar corrosion for evaluating the structural safety of aging bridges.

• Journal of the Korea institute for structural maintenance and inspection
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• v.23 no.4
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• pp.1-7
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• 2019

As a unify operational processes of the safety inspection for major national facilities, it is expected that the efficiency and professionalism of the project will be enhanced. Also it is being emphasized that the importance of visual inspection that initially find physical and functional defects in facilities. In this study, we developed an E-PAD-based condition evaluation system to check the safety of the facility to overcome the problems and limitations of the existing inspection method. This system consists of introduction, work list, visual inspection, defect table and so on. It is possible to download the inspection drawings at the site and input the damage information to the drawings and check the evaluation grade. In order to verify the E-PAD based condition evaluation system, the inspection data of 10 sample bridges were inputted into the system and the evaluation results were compared. As a result, it was confirmed that the safety grade calculated from the system and the existing safety grade are the same. The feasibility analysis of the AHP method also showed that the function increased by 10%, cost by 36%, and value by 30% compared to the existing method. Therefore, it is expected to contribute to systematic data and information analysis system for improvement of facility management.

• Journal of the Korea institute for structural maintenance and inspection
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• v.21 no.6
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• pp.185-195
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• 2017

In recent years, unexpected bridge fire accidents have increased because of augmenting the number of traffic volumes and hazardous materials by the increment in traffics and distribution business. Furthermore, in accordance with the effort of using the under space of bridges, the ratio of occupied by combustible materials like oil tanker or lorry has been increased. As a result, the occurrence of bridge fire has been growing drastically. In order to mitigate the accident of bridge fire, risk assessment of bridge fire has been studied, however, practical risk models considering safety from users' viewpoints were scarce. This study represented quantitative risk assessment model applicable to national road bridges in Korea. The primary factors with significant impacts on bridge fire accidents was chosen such as clearance height, materials of bridges, arrival time of fire truck and fire intensity. The selected factors were used for Fire Dynamics Simulation (FDS) and the peak temperature calculated by FDS in accordance with the fire duration and fire intensity. The risk assessment model in bridge fire reflected the FDS analysis results, the fire damage criteria, and the grade of fire truck arrival time was established. Response plans for bridge fire accidents according to the risk assessment output has been discussed. Lastly, distances between bridges and fire stations were calculated by GIS network analysis. Based on the suggested assessment model and methodology, sample bridges were selected and graded for the risk assessment.

• Journal of the Korea institute for structural maintenance and inspection
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• v.20 no.5
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• pp.50-57
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• 2016

The present study proposed three inspection reliability indices which compared inspection results evaluated at in-depth(routine) inspection and in-depth safety inspection; Nominal inspection reliability index, Real inspection reliability index, and DS nominal inspection reliability index. The methods to improve the inspection reliability were also proposed. Since bridge inspection process is critical to ensuring the safety of bridges and identifying repair and maintenance needs, the quality of the inspection data produced from the inspection process is very important. Consequently, the inspection reliability indices were suggested to evaluate quality of current inspection practices. Specifically, approximately 85% of inspection errors evaluated by the DS nominal inspection reliability index are within 1 rating grade(equal to or less than damage score ${\pm}0.1$). In order to improve the inspection reliability, transportation agency should implement QC(Quality Control) practices and develop professional expertises of inspectors by higher requirements for inspectors, on-off line inspection training and etc.

• Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.61-71
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• 2010

The attributes related to the health condition of RC deck slabs are analyzed to help us identify and rate the safety level of the bridges in this study. According to the related reports the state assessment for the outward aspects of bridges is the important and critical part for rating the overall structural safety. In this respect, the careful identification for the various state attributes make the field inspection and structural diagnosis very effective. This study analyzes the influence of the state attributes on evaluation classes and the relationship of them by the inductive reasoning, which raise the understanding and performance for evaluation work, and support the logical approach for the state assessment. ID3 algorithm applied to the case set which is constructed from the field reports indicates the main attributes and the precedence governing the assessment, and derives the decision hierarchy for the state assessment.