Traffic load is critical to the bridge lifetime performance and safety. The constant growth of traffic on some lifeline long-span bridges as well as a huge number of medium and short-span bridges has posed increasing liveload on the bridges throughout their service lives. To identify the worstcase scenarios of live load on a bridge is often more than straightforward. In order to capture all scenarios which could be critical to the bridgelife-time performance, time-variant microscopic information such as totalnumbers, types, locations and velocities of individual vehicles on the bridge is often necessary. The present study aims at developing a simulationplatform to provide microscopic traffic information for various bridge-related studies. This platform is developed based on the cellular-automaton traffic flow simulation technique with some realistic traffic rules applied. The analytical basis of the platform is developed with simulation rules; secondly, traffic flow on a typical roadway-bridge-roadway system is simulated. Parametric studies of some critical parameters, such as length of approaching roadways, traffic occupancy, speed limit and bridge span length, are conducted.
Abstract