Traffic load modeling based on structural health monitoring data

Chengming Lan & Hui Li

School of Civil Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China

Jinping Ou
School of Civil Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China; School of Civil and Hydraulic Engineering, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China

ABSTRACT: Live load models are foundation for life-cycle design of highway bridges. Many highway bridges are now equipped with structural health monitoring systems, which provide valuable data to establish load models. In this paper, traffic load models of the Binzhou Yellow River Highway Bridge are developed based on the field measurement of vehicles by an already installed structural health monitoring system. The probabilistic distribution model and extreme value distribution of gross vehicle weight are statistically analyzed using the monitoring data and the results indicate that they follow the Bimodal-Lognormal Distribution and Gumbel Distribution, respectively.

INTRODUCTION

DESCRIPTION OF THE BRIDGE

Traffic load is one of the most critical factors that influence a bridge design, analysis and maintenance. Important traffic load information includes the most possible maximum gross vehicle weight during the design return period. The extrapolation and statistical analysis are frequently employed to obtain the most possible maximum gross vehicle weight within the design return period. The extrapolation approach was proposed by Nowak (1994). This approach provides an easy and effective way to obtain the maximum value of related parameters. It can avoid complicated simulation. Nowak (1994) used this approach to obtain the traffic load model of the Ontario Highway Bridge Design Code. However, the approach is subjective and the accuracy depends on the experience of the researchers. The statistical analysis approach is an effective method to obtain the cumulative distribution function (CDF) of gross vehicle weight and axle weight. Miao and Chan (2002) used this approach to obtain the traffic load model for Hong Kong. The disadvantage of the statistical analysis approach is its complexity. In this paper, traffic load models are established based on the measurement of vehicles by a structural health monitoring system installed on the Binzhou Yellow River Highway Bridge (BYRHB). The probabilistic distribution model and extreme value distribution of gross vehicle weight are statistically analyzed using the monitoring data.

The Shandong Binzhou Yellow River Highway Bridge is a three-tower cable-stayed bridge carrying a dual three-lane carriageway over the Yellow Rive, as shown in Figure 1. This bridge is located in Shandong Province, China, providing an important connection between Eastern and Northern China. The construction of the bridge began in August, 2001, and was completed in November, 2003, and opened to traffic in July, 2004. The entire length of the bridge is 1698.4 m with a 13.102 km highway approach and connection line. The main bridge has a total length of 768 m, consisting of two 300 m spans and two 84 m side-spans. A sophisticated structural health monitoring system was installed on this bridge and became operational since 2004 (Ou, 2003; Li et al, 2006). The measurement of vehicles passing through this bridge provides the valuable raw data to model the traffic loads.

3 3.1

EXTREME VALUE DISTRIBUTION OF VEHICLE LOAD Probability distribution of vehicle load

The data of gross vehicle weight have been collected by the SHM system since 2004. One-day data is taken to be an observation unit for analyzing the probability distribution and extreme value distribution of vehicle

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84m

300m

300m

84m

Figure 1.

General view of the Shandong Binzhou Yellow River Highway Bridge.

7000 6000 5000 Histogram of gross vehicle weight

1.0 0.9 0.8 0.7 CDF F(x) 0.6 0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1
0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000 1100 Gross vehicle weight kN

Vehicle number

4000 3000 2000 1000 0

CDF of samples CDF of LND CDF of IGD 0 200 400 600 800 Gross vehicle weight kN 1000 1200

0.0

Figure 2.

The histogram of gross vehicle weight.

Figure 3. Cumulative distribution functions of LND and IGD of the gross vehicle weight.

gross weight for this bridge. Statistic operation is repeatedly conducted on every day data and the results indicate that the statistic characteristics of gross weight for all days are almost the same. Therefore, a sample drawn randomly from the data in 2005 is employed to modeling the traffic load. The histogram of gross vehicle weight is shown in Figure 2. It can be seen from Figure 2 that vehicle with weights less than 100 kN (light vehicles) are dominant, however, heavy trucks with weight of more than 700 kN are also observed. The mean, standard deviation and coefficient of variation of the sample are 104.94 kN, 172.83 kN and 1.647, respectively. Generally, the Lognormal Normal Distribution (LND) and Inverse Gaussian Distribution (IGD) which are the unimodal distribution are frequently used to

fit the cumulative distribution function (CDF) of the samples and the results are shown in Figure 3. The Kolmogorov-Smirnov test (KS-test) (Hahn, 1994) is adopted herein to determine if a sample comes from a population with a specific distribution, which can offer a critical value following a given reliable parameter. The advantage of this approach is that all deviations can be obtained between every observed distribution point and theoretical distribution point. The LND and IGD cannot be accepted by the KS-test at the 5% significance level. Therefore, the LND and IGD cannot be used to model the probability distribution of the gross vehicle weight. Since the regularity of the logarithm of gross load is clearly observed from Figure 4,

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1.0 0.9 0.8 0.7

Histogram of PDF

1.0 0.9 0.8 0.7

L is always nonnegative and attains its maximum for the same value of as ln L. Since ln L is in the form of a sum rather than a product, it is generally easier to obtain by solving
CDF F(y)

PDF f(y)

0.6 0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1 0.0

1.5 2.0 2.5

0.6

Estimated PDF CDF of sample Estimated CDF

0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1

d ln L(x1 , x2 , . . ., xn ; ) d

(4)

0.0 3.0 3.5 4.0 4.5 5.0 5.5 6.0 6.5 7.0

The single parameter estimation procedure can be directly extended to multi-parameter estimation. In the case of m parameters, the likelihood function becomes
n

Logarithm of gross vehicle weight y

Figure 4. Probability density function and cumulative distribution function of variable Y .

L( ) =
i=1

fX (xi ; 1 , 2 , . . ., m )

(5)

the logarithmic distribution of gross vehicle weight can be obtained by univariate finite mixtures of Normal Distribution. X denotes the gross vehicle weight with a unit of kN and Y is the natural logarithm of X , i.e. Y = ln(X ).F(y) is the CDF of Y and expressed by F(y) = p1 y Y 1 Y 1 + p2 y Y 2 Y 2 (1)

and the MLEs of j , j = 1, 2, . . ., m, are obtained by simultaneously solving the system of likelihood equations lnL = 0, j j = 1, 2, . . ., m (6)

where p1 and p2 respectively represent the weight or mixing coefficients for the first and second term, and p1 + p2 = 1; () is the CDF of standard normal distribution; Y 1 , Y 1 , Y 2 and Y 2 are the statistical parameters of the distribution in Eq. (1). The Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) method is used to obtain the statistical parameters from the samples in this paper. Let fX (x; ) be the density function of variable X , where, for simplicity, is the only parameter to be estimated from a set of sample valuesx1 , x2 , . . ., xn . The likelihood function of is defined as,
n

In this way the greatest probability is given to the observed set of events, provided that the true form of probability density distribution is known. A 180-day vehicle weight data are used as samples to estimate the statistical parameters in Eq. (1). The estimated values of the statistical parameters in Eq. (1) are 0.543, 0.457, 2.542, 0.342, 4.901 and 1.024 for p1 , p2 , Y 1 , Y 1 , Y 2 and Y 2 . The PDF and CDF of Y are shown in Figure 4. Based on the estimated results, the CDF of X can be written as, FX (x) = P(X x) = P(Y ln x) = FY (ln x) = p1 ln x Y 1 Y 1 + p2 ln x Y 2 Y 2 (7)

L() =
i=1

fX (xi ; )

(2)

When the sample values are given, the likelihood function L becomes a function of a single variable . The estimation procedure for based on the method of maximum likelihood consists of choosing, as an estimate of , the particular value of that maximizes L. The maximum of L() occurs in most cases at the value of , where dL/d is zero. Hence, the maxi mum likelihood estimate of based on sample values x1 , x2 , . . ., xn can be determined from, dL(x1 , x2 , . . ., xn ; ) =0 d (3)

It is clear that the CDF of X are the mixtures of two LND (called Bimodal-Lognormal Distribution, BLD) with different parameters. For the gross weight of light cars, it follows the LND (LN (13.472, 4.7462 )) with a probability of occurrence p1 = 0.543, whereas, for the gross weight of heavy trucks, it follows LND (LN (227.125, 309.3962 )) with a probability of occurrence p2 = 0.457. The CDF of X obtained from Eq. (7) are shown in Figure 5. It is observed that the curve of CDF of X shown in Figure 5 can better trace the measured one than that shown in Figure 3. The CDF of BLD with the estimated parameters is accepted by KS-test at the significance level of 1%. Therefore, the Bimodal-Lognormal Distribution can be used to model the CDF of the gross vehicle weight.

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1.0 0.9 0.8 0.7 0.6 0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1 0.0 0 200 CDF of samples CDF of BLD 400 600 800 Gross vehicle weight kN 1000 1200

CDF F(x)

Figure 6.

Diagrammatic sketch of filtered Poisson process.

Figure 5. Cumulative distribution function of BLD of the gross vehicle weight.

3.2

Extreme value distribution of traffic load

Since the load duration of a vehicle on a bridge is very short, the gross vehicle load stochastic process on a bridge can be described approximately by a filtered Poisson process (Lin, 1990). Hence, a filtered Poisson process is employed to simulate the gross vehicle load stochastic process {s(t), t [0, T ]} in this paper. The diagrammatic sketch of filtered Poisson process is shown in Figure 6. The filtered Poisson process which is used to simulate gross vehicle load stochastic process is
N (t)

For the purpose of obtaining the extreme value probability distribution of gross vehicle weight, the first peak associated with light vehicles is not of interest. For this reason, the splitting of Poisson process is discussed next. Let {N (t), t 0} be a Poisson process with rate . Suppose that each arrival of the process is classified as being either type 1 arrivals or type 2 arrivals with respectively independent probabilities p1 and p2 of all other arrivals. Let Ni (t) be the number of type i (i = 1, 2) arrivals up to time t. Then {N1 (t)} and {N2 (t)} are two independent Poisson processes with respective rates p1 and p2 (Tijms, 2003). Therefore, stochastic process of the gross vehicle weight can be split into two independent Poisson processes with rate p1 and p2 , the former for modeling light vehicles, while the latter for heavy trucks. The extreme value distribution of heavy truck in one day is expressed as, FM (x) = exp {p2 T1 [1 FZ (x)]} , x0 (11)

s(t) =
n=0

n I (t, n )

(8)

where{N (t), t [0, T ]} is a Poisson process with parameter, and n (n = 1, 2, . . . ) are variables following F(x), independent of each other and 0 = 0. The responding function is expressed by I (t, n ) = 1, t n ; 0, t n , / (9)

where n is the load duration of the nth vehicle and 0 = 0. The extreme value probability distribution of a filtered Poisson processis expressed by FM (x) = exp [T (1 F(x))] , 0, x 0; x < 0, (10)

where FM (x) is the CDF of extreme value in one day, the time intervals can be approximately described as the Exponential Distribution, FZ (x) is the CDF of heavy trucks followed LND (LN (227.125, 309.3962 )), obviously, T1 = 86400 s. For the Shandong Binzhou Yellow River Highway Bridge, the estimation value ofobtained using measurement data is 0.02385 Based on the Unified Standard for Reliability Design of Highway Engineering Structures (China, GB/T 50283-1999), the extreme value distribution of gross vehicle weight in one day is used to represent their extreme value distribution in one year, and then the extreme value distribution of vehicles in service-life can be written as FT (x) = exp {p2 T2 [1 FM (x)]} , x0 (12)

where F(x) is the CDF of gross vehicle weight mentioned above; is the parameter of Poisson process and can be calculated by the MLE approach based on the survey data; and T is the period of requirement.

where FT (x) is extreme value distribution of gross vehicle weight in service-life; T2 is service-life or remaining service life with units of year. Solving Eq. (12) directly is more difficult due to the complicated function FM (x)in this equation. Therefore, the Monte Carlo simulation method (Kottegoda, 1998), which is one of the most commonly effective approaches to simulate complicated random variables

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and stochastic processes, is adopted to solve Eq. (12). It has been proven that the CDF is always uniformly distributed on [0, 1] (Eckhardt et al. 1987). Since the random variable x and the CDF F(x) are 1-to-1, one can sample x by first sampling y = F(x) and then solving for x by inverting F(x), or x = F 1 (y). Therefore, a random numbers sample from U[0, 1] are generated and the value of x is determined by inversion, x = F 1 ( ). This method sometimes called the Golden Rule for Sampling. According to this method, many counterfeit functions could be produced by means of the Monte Carlo approach. Supposed that the service-life is 100 years, 100 counterfeit random numbers of extreme value distribution are obtained by Monte Carlo approach and checked by KS-test whether the Normal, the Lognormal, the Weibull, the Gamma, the Inverse Gauss, and the Gumbel Distribution (Extreme-Value Type-I Distribution) can describe the extreme value distribution of the gross vehicle weight or not. Based on the simulated results, only the Gumbel distribution can be accepted by KS-test at the significance level of 1%.. Therefore, the extreme value distribution of the gross vehicle weight is as follows FT (x) = exp( exp((x b)/a)), x0 (13)

ii. The gross vehicle load stochastic process on a bridge can be described approximately by a filtered Poisson process. Further study indicates that the extreme value distribution of the gross vehicle weight follows the Gumbel Distribution. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT This study is financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under the following grants: 50525823, 50538020 and 50278029. REFERENCES
Eckhardt R., Ulam J. and Neumann J.V (1987). The Monte . Carlo Method. Los Alamos Science. Hahn G.J. and Shapiro S.S. (1994) Statistical Models in Engineering. John Wiley & Sons Ltd, New York. Kottegoda N.T. and Rosso R. (1998). Statistics Probability and Reliability for Civil and Environmental Engineers. The McGraw Hills Companies Inc, Singapore. Li H., Ou J.P., Zhao X.F., Zhou W.S., Li H.W., Zhou Z. and Yang Y.S. (2006). Structural health monitoring system for the Shandong Binzhou Yellow River Highway Bridge. Computer-Aided Civil and Infrastructure Engineering, 21, 306317. Lin Z.M. (1990). The Reliability Design and Estimation of Structure Engineering. China Communications Press (in Chinese) Miao T.J. and Chan T.H.T. (2002). Bridge live load models from WIM data. Engineering Structures, 24, 10711084. Nowak A.S. (1994). Load model for bridge design code. Canadian Journal of Civil Engineering, 21, 3649. Ou J.P. (2003). Some recent advances of structural health monitoring systems for civil infrastructure in mainland China. Proceedings of the First International Conference on Structural Health Monitoring and Intelligent Infrastructure, Tokyo, Japan, 131144. Shandong Transportation Bureau (1998). The Feasibility Research Report of the Shandong Binzhou Yellow River Highway Bridge on 205 National Highway, Technique report. (In Chinese) Tijms H.C. (2003). A First Course in Stochastic Models. John Wiley & Sons Ltd, Chichester.

where a = 38.79and b = 1676.51 which are obtained by MLE and the units of gross vehicle weight is kN. 4 CONCLUSION

Traffic load models of the Shandong Binzhou Yellow River Highway Bridge are established in this case study based on the field measurement by a structural health monitoring system installed on this bridge. The following conclusions are obtained from this case study: i. The probability distribution of the gross vehicle weight follows the Bimodal-Lognormal Distribution, one peak for light cars and another for heavy trucks. In this case study, for the gross weight of light cars, it follows the LND (LN (13.472, 4.7462 )) with a probability of occurrence p1 = 0.543; whereas, for the gross weight of heavy trucks, it follows LND (LN (227.125, 309.3962 )) with a probability of occurrence p2 = 0.457.

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