The key aspect for the quantification of indirect impacts of flooding is the assessment of the disruption of the transportation service considering social and economic consequences. To investigate how flooding can affect road transportation, it is essential to analyze interaction during the flood event itself, as well as on the following days. In this work, two static and dynamic traffic models are applied to a study zone for quantification of the performance and functionality of the network during the flood and after the failure of infrastructure components. A mesoscopic simulation was applied to identify the traffic disruption in the face of flood events. This simulation is capable of considering the road network model, assigning trip paths with the impact of road closures and speed reductions, and evaluating travel time and vehicle volume redistribution in a given disruption scenario. By comparing the traffic analysis results (travel time, travelled distance and street speed changes) in normal and flooded situations, the impact of flooding on a transportation network could be examined. Moreover, modelling outputs from a case study in the Santarém region (Portugal) indicated that in analyzing the flood impacts on a traffic network, even non-flooded infrastructures must be taken into account because of their service disruption.
This paper presents the effectiveness of soft computing algorithms in analyzing the bond behavior of fiber reinforced polymer (FRP) systems inserted in the cover of concrete elements, commonly known as the near-surface mounted (NSM) technique. It focuses on the use of Data Mining (DM) algorithms as an alternative to the existing guidelines’ models to predict the bond strength of NSM FRP systems. To ease and spread the use of DM algorithms, a web-based tool is presented. This tool was developed to allow an easy use of the DM prediction models presented in this work, where the user simply provides the values of the input variables, the same as those used by the guidelines, in order to get the predictions. The results presented herein show that the DM based models are robust and more accurate than the guidelines’ models and can be considered as a relevant alternative to those analytical methods
This paper presents design procedures for fibre reinforced polymer (FRP) systems inserted in the cover of concrete elements according to the near-surface mounted (NSM) technique. Such strengthening system depends greatly on their bond strength. Two existing design formulations to estimate the bond strength of NSM FRP systems in concrete are studied. A reliability analysis is conducted with the purpose of making the design formulations consistent with the partial safety factors philosophy, including the Eurocodes. Hence, the necessary probabilistic distributions are calibrated based on a large database of bond tests. The results presented herein show that the existing guidelines can be extended and adopted under the framework of the Eurocodes. However, mainly due to their limitations in addressing individually all the possible failure modes, the variability of the probabilistic distributions found are quite high, leading to high partial coefficients of safety. Thus, in the future, new and improved formulations should be developed