CONTINUING DEVELOPMENTS ON THE MULTI-PART AASHTO LRFD SPECIFICATIONS FOR BRIDGES

In 1993, following a five-year concentrated effort, the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) adopted new specifications for bridge design as a co-equal to the time-honored standard specifications - "The AASHTO LRFD Bridge Design Specifications". This paper summarizes the development of the specifications, outlines the decision-making processes, introduces how reliability-based design and limit states are related to design load combinations, describes the limit state philosophy and introduces post-adoption maintenance and education efforts, and introduces the ongoing work to extend the LRFD Specifications into a multi-volume set of specifications. For the covering abstract see ITRD E111699.