Indirect Cost Effects on Life-Cycle-Cost Effective Optimum Design of Steel Box Girder Bridge

This paper presents the effects of indirect costs on Life-Cycle-Cost(LCC) effective optimum design of steel-box girder bridges. The LCC formulations considered in the LCC optimization of the bridges consist of initial cost and expected rehabilitation costs including repair/replacement costs, loss of contents or fatality and injury losses, and indirect costs such as road user costs and indirect socio-economic losses. To demonstrate the LCC-effectiveness for optimum design of the bridges, an actual steel box girder bridge having two continuous spans(2@50m=100m) is considered as a numerical example. And also, in this paper, various sensitivity analyses are performed to investigate the effects of indirect costs caused by traffic conditions such as number of detour route, number of lane on detour route, length of detour route, and traffic volumes on the LCC-effective optimum design. From the numerical investigations, it may be concluded that indirect costs caused by traffic network may sensitively influence on the LCC-effective optimum design of steel-box girder bridges. Therefore, it may be stated that the traffic conditions should be considered as one of the important items in the LCC-effective optimum design of the bridges.