• Journal of the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea
• /
• v.14 no.2
• /
• pp.1-13
• /
• 2010

This paper proposes an optimal design method for the nonlinear seismic isolated bridge. The probabilities of failure at the pier and the seismic isolator are considered as objective functions for optimal design, and a multi-objective optimization technique is employed to efficiently explore a set of multiple solutions optimizing mutually-conflicting objective functions at the same time. In addition, a stochastic linearization method is incorporated into the multi-objective optimization framework in order to effectively estimate the stochastic responses of the bridge without performing numerous nonlinear time history analyses during the optimization process. As a numerical example to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method, the Nam-Han river bridge is taken into account, and the proposed method and the existing life-cycle-cost based design method are both applied for the purpose of comparing their seismic performances. The comparative results demonstrate that the proposed method not only shows better seismic performance but also is more economical than the existing cost-based design method. The proposed method is also proven to guarantee improved performance under variations in seismic intensity, in bandwidth and in the predominant frequency of the seismic event.