The Federal Highway Administration is turning to risk-based, data-driven ways of evaluating and rating bridges. Shay Burrows, team leader for structures safety and management for the FHWA, said that the agency is replacing traditional sufficiency rating numbers with simpler terms such as “good,” “fair,” and “poor” in describing bridges.

Speaking to attendees of the International Bridge Conference last month, he noted the recently issued “Refined Analysis in Bridge Design and Evaluation” manual from the FHWA, which provides guidelines for engineers to use “refined” analysis in modeling bridges.

The manual states: “Current … Bridge Design Specifications feature a reliability-based approach to bridge design…and limit state design with conservatism built in to envelope the limits of applicability and consider all the relevant parameters. Conservatism always adds unnecessary cost, which may have serious implications for owner-agencies with limited budgets.”

Moreover, the manual states that “designers …focus on developing and using complex automated calculation tools to execute the necessary code checks rather than performing meaningful structural modeling to better understand behavior and address the limit states that are being evaluated. This often hides the controlling factors and hinders the development of new bridge innovations in general. A properly and efficiently executed refined analysis can provide substantially better information about the state of stress in a bridge and allow for more cost-effective and reliable design.”

Burrows also cautioned that automated vehicle technology will pose potential new challenges to infrastructure. For example, a fleet of automated trucks traveling close together can cause extra loading on a bridge. “We’re not having these conversations,” he said, referring to the transportation industry. “We need to be.”

He added, “But a smart bridge could signal to the trucks that ‘you’re too heavy for me’ or ‘I’m only 14 feet high.’”

IBC的特色代理机构是华盛顿州运输部。沃斯多特秘书罗杰·米拉尔（Roger Millar）表示，该州在未来10年内有69亿美元的基础设施保护需求，其中包括15亿美元的桥梁改造。

WSDOT桥设计工程师Bijan Khaleghi使用超高绩效混凝土描述了该机构的完全预制的弯曲系统的演示项目，该项目具有现场扩张基础。该机构还在测试自我居中的预制混凝土柱，并通过它们贯穿其中的后张紧链。随着一柱在地震期间经历横向载荷，PT链弹性伸展以吸收地震能量并在事件发生后恢复其原始张力载荷。