Current international guidelines determine the effect of pedestrians on footbridges via an equivalent harmonic load. However, the dynamic response of footbridges obtained according to these standards differs from the values recorded experimentally. In order to overcome this issue, a new modelling framework has been recently proposed by several researchers. This novel approach allows considering more accurately three key aspects: (i) the inter- and intra-subject variability, (ii) the pedestrian-structure interaction and (iii) the crowd dynamics. For this purpose, different crowd-structure interaction models have been developed. Despite the large number of proposals, all of them share the same scheme: the crowd-structure interaction is simulated by linking two sub-models, namely (i) a pedestrian-structure interaction sub-model and (ii) a crowd sub-model. Furthermore, the variability of the pedestrian’s behaviour may be taken into account via the assumption that the model parameters are random variables. In this chapter, a summary of the state-of-art of this new modelling framework is presented, with special emphasis in a case study where the crowd-structure interaction model developed by the authors is used to simulate the lateral lock-in phenomenon on a real footbridge.
Part of the book: Bridge Engineering