Heuristic Analysis of Bridge Trusses Under AASHTO Live Loads

In a recent article, Adeli and Balasubramanyam [2] presented a heuristic approach for analysis of bridge trusses subjected to American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) moving loads. This procedure is based on the recognition of patterns of influence line diagrams (ILDs) for various members of a bridge truss. The procedure was applied to Pratt trusses. This arricle extends and generalizes the previous work of the authors by applying it to other classes of trusses, i.e., the statically determinate K-trusses and the statically indeterminate Parker trusses. This approach is significantly more efficient than the bruteforce method of generating the nodal load vectors due to the moving loads positioned at numerous locations along the span and performing numerous structural analyses. Thus, it is particularly suitable for microcomputers. The heuristic approach presented in this article can be easily extended to other classes of bridge trusses.