Accelerating the Serviceability-Based Design of Reinforced Concrete Rail Bridges under Geometric Uncertainties induced by unforeseen events: A Surrogate Modeling approach

Abstract

Reinforced concrete rail bridges are essential components of railway infrastructure, where reliability, durability, and adaptability are key design priorities. However, the design process is often complicated by uncertainties stemming from unforeseen construction constraints, such as the need to reposition piers or alter geometric characteristics. These design adaptations can lead to repeated redesigns, added costs, and project delays if not anticipated in the early design stages, as well as significant computational overhead when using traditional finite element (FE) simulations. To address this and anticipate such unexpected events, this study adopts surrogate modeling as an efficient probabilistic design approach. This methodology integrates key geometric parameters as random variables, capturing the uncertainties that may arise during the design and construction phases and propagating them on the bridge's performance functions. By doing so, we aim to enable the efficient exploration of a large number of design scenarios with minimal reliance on time-consuming finite element (FE) simulations, represent the performance functions of a reinforced concrete bridge as a function of our variable design parameters, and classify the overall design scenarios into failure and safe scenarios In this study, a four-span reinforced concrete bridge deck is modeled using a multi-fiber finite element approach in Cast3M software. This FE model is used to generate the required design of experiments to train the surrogate models. Within this framework, a comparative performance assessment is conducted to evaluate the performance of the Kriging surrogate against alternative methods, including polynomial chaos expansion (implemented in UQLab) and support vector regression (SVR). This methodology supports early-stage uncertainty-informed design, enhancing the robustness and adaptability of reinforced concrete rail bridges in the face of practical constraints and changing site conditions.