CONDITION PREDICTION OF DETERIORATING CONCRETE BRIDGES USING BAYESIAN UPDATING. DISCUSSION AND CLOSURE

A discussion of an earlier paper with the aforementioned title by M.P. Enright and D.M. Frangopol, published in this journal (Volume 125, Number 10, October 1999), is presented. The discussers feel that implementation of the authors' methodology for assessment of deteriorating concrete bridges by Bayesian processes would require additional explanations, verifications, and extensions in order to be put into practical use. Several strong assumptions by the authors, such as those dealing with stochastic independence of random variables, are not clearly justified and motivated. The authors provide closure addressing these and other points and attempt to allay the issues raised by the discussers.