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The prefabricated reinforced concrete (RC) hollow slab bridges, with the advantages of high quality, lower cost and shorter construction period, have been widely used for small-to-medium-span highway bridges in China. Because of environmental deterioration and traffic volume increases, the performance of the bridge system deteriorates gradually. Accurate bridge system evaluation can provide a reliable basis for maintenance and management. A bridge system is composed of multiple interrelated components, which makes the system reliability evaluation become a computationally intractable work. In this paper, an effective method was proposed to evaluate the system reliability of the prefabricated RC hollow slab bridge considering hinge joint damage based on the modified analytic hierarchy process (AHP). Considering the subjectivity of the traditional AHP method in constructing the judgment matrix, this paper proposed an objective construction method of the judgment matrix to modify the traditional AHP. The modified hinge plate method (MHPM) proposed by the previous research was utilized to analyze the effect of hinge joint damage on system reliability. In order to verify the applicability of the proposed system reliability evaluation method, a simply supported RC hollow slab bridge was selected as the case study and the system reliability indexes were compared with the traditional series and parallel methods. The results indicated that the traditional methods were either too conservative or too radical to objectively evaluate the actual system reliability level of the structure. In contrast, the proposed method in this paper was more suitable for evaluating the system reliability of such bridges, and more accurate in providing maintenance decision makers with a relatively reasonable bridge condition information.

The system reliability evaluation of a bridge structure is a complicated problem. Previous studies have commonly used approximate estimation methods, such as the wide bounds method and the narrow bounds method, but neither could obtain an accurate result. In recent years, the copula theory has been introduced into the system reliability evaluation, which can obtain more accurate results than the approximate methods. However, most studies simply construct binary copula functions to consider the joint failure of two failure modes. For a complex bridge structure composed of multiple components and failure modes, the joint failure of multiple failure modes needs to be considered. Before evaluating the system reliability, it is necessary to determine the failure criteria of the system. Different failure criteria for simply supported beam bridges have been proposed. However, there is no standard available to determine which failure criterion to choose, and the selection of failure criteria is ambiguous. In this paper, a novel method is proposed to evaluate the system reliability of a simply supported beam bridge by considering multiple failure criteria based on multivariate copulas and the analytic hierarchy process entropy weight (AHP–EW) method. The method first considers multiple failure criteria comprehensively and constructs multivariate copulas for the joint failure of multiple components in a bridge system reliability evaluation. The AHP–EW method is a comprehensive weighting method combining the analytic hierarchy process and entropy weight methods, which is used to establish the hierarchical analysis model between system reliability and multiple failure criteria. By considering the joint failure of multiple failure modes in the system reliability evaluation under a single failure criterion, multivariate copula functions were constructed. In order to verify the applicability of the proposed bridge system reliability method, a simply supported reinforced concrete (RC) hollow slab bridge composed of nine slab segments was selected as the numerical example. The results indicate that the method proposed in this paper could evaluate the bridge system reliability more comprehensively and reasonably.

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