Sensitivity Study of Design Parameters Used to Develop Bridge Specific Fragility Curves

Bridges are essential lifelines for transportation networks during and after an earthquake event, providing routes for emergency response and evacuations. For this reason, bridge fragility modeling has been a major focus in earthquake research, as fragility analysis aids in the post-event determination of possible damage of bridges as well as in pre-event mitigation planning. While fragility analysis had been used for those purposes, this paper explores the use as a design aid. A bridge specific fragility methodology can be developed that takes into account certain design aspects of a bridge design in order to provide fragility curves particular to a bridge design. In order to support this fragility method, appropriate design parameters must be identified that most affect the response of a bridge, and will describe the fragility of a specific bridge given a set of these parameters. This paper conducts a sensitivity study to test which design parameters have a significant impact on bridge response and should therefore be considered as predictive variables in bridge specific fragility analysis used in the design process.