Colin Caprani

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Research theme

Bridge Traffic Loading

The loads a bridge must carry are set by the traffic that crosses it. The number that matters for design and assessment is the characteristic load effect, the value reached only rarely over a long life. Estimating it means modelling the heaviest vehicles, the way they meet and queue, and the rare combinations that govern, from short spans up to the longest.

Our contributions

We build traffic models from weigh-in-motion data and traffic microsimulation, and release them as open tools so others can use them: PyBTLS for short-to-medium spans and SimBA for long spans. The work informs the bridge loading provisions of AS5100, and feeds international practice through the IABSE and JCSS traffic-loading groups.

People

Shiyi Mei
Postdoc · Multi-body heavy vehicle–bridge interaction
Alessandro Lipari
Alumnus · Micro-simulation modelling of traffic loading on long-span bridges
Dong Guo
Alumnus · Improved modelling of long-span highway bridge traffic loading
Mayer Melhem
Alumnus · A structural reliability approach for the management of heavy-vehicle access on highway bridge networks
Fatemeh Shaker
PhD candidate · Bridge traffic loading, reliability assessment and model error
Liam McCarthy
Alumnus · Probabilistic analysis of indeterminate highway bridges considering material nonlinearity

Selected publications · 82 in this area

  1. Z. Liu, D. Dias-da-Costa, M. E. Hassanabadi, T. Chan, C. Caprani, C. W. Kim, M. M. Alamdari (2026). Output‑only road roughness identification from vehicle axle accelerations through a universal smoothing method. Journal of Sound and Vibration doi ↗
  2. C. C. Caprani, Z. Zhou (2026). PyBTLS: A Python-C++ open-source package for traffic load simulation on short-to-medium span bridges. SoftwareX doi ↗
  3. A. Rizqiansyah, C. C. Caprani (2026). On the Upper Bound of the Distribution of Bridge Traffic Loading. Reliability Engineering and System Safety doi ↗
  4. J. Zhou, Q. Zheng, T. Tang, B. Wei, X. Zhou, C. C. Caprani (2025). A novel load testing method for condition assessment of network-level highway bridges using moving artificial truck fleets in an open traffic environment. Engineering Structures doi ↗
  5. A. Rizqiansyah, C. C. Caprani (2024). Hierarchical Bayesian modeling of highway bridge network extreme traffic loading. Structural Safety doi ↗
  6. J. Zhou, W. Wu, C. C. Caprani, Z. Tan, B. Wei, J. Zhang (2024). A hybrid virtual–real traffic simulation approach to reproducing the spatiotemporal distribution of bridge loads. Computer-Aided Civil and Infrastructure Engineering doi ↗
  7. Z. Zhou, C. C. Caprani (2024). PyBTLS: A Python package for traffic load simulation on short-to-medium bridges. Bridge Maintenance, Safety, Management, Digitalization and Sustainability doi ↗
  8. C. C. Caprani, M. S. Khan (2024). Reliability calibration of load factors for the Australian rail traffic load model. Bridge Maintenance, Safety, Management, Digitalization and Sustainability doi ↗
  9. S. Mei, C. C. Caprani, D. Cantero (2023). Dynamic amplification of multi-span simply-supported prestressed concrete girder viaducts subjected to multi-body heavy vehicles. Structures doi ↗
  10. A. Rizqiansyah, C. C. Caprani (2023). Bayesian hierarchical modelling of bridge traffic loading across a road network. Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Applications of Statistics and Probability in Civil Engineering, ICASP14

All publications →