Service life of the reinforced concrete bridge deck in corrosive environments: A soft computing system

In the recent years, the soft computing techniques are increasingly applied in many fields of civil engineering due to their capabilities in computation and knowledge processing. In this paper, a soft computing system is developed to estimate the service life of reinforced concrete bridge deck as one of the most important issues in the civil engineering. The proposed system utilizes four fuzzy interfaces to quantify the exposure condition, required cover thickness, corrosion current density, and pitting corrosion ratio. The computational core of the proposed system employs α-level optimization in conjunction with the mentioned fuzzy systems to estimate the entire service life. The service life of structurally designed reinforced concrete bridge deck sample is assessed by both proposed system and traditional probabilistic method. The results showed that the proposed system could effectively predict the service life; however, it estimated longer service life in comparison with the probabilistic method.