Climate-smarter design of Soil-Steel Composite Bridges using Set-Based Design

Paper in proceeding, 2022

The Swedish Transport Administration (STA) strives to reduce the climate impact in their pro-jects. Soil-Steel Composite Bridges (SSC-Bridges) is one of the most commonly used bridge types in Sweden. The design of SSC-Bridges is traditionally done as Point-Based Design where one single design is tested. With a novel design method called Set-Based Design (SBD) we simultaneously assess instead multiple solutions for every single bridge, which gives the possibility to choose the most optimal design that fulfils the design criteria. This paper investigates the potential of adopting an SBD approach in the design of SSC-Bridges with respect to CO2-equivalents emissions and material cost. The results show that there is great potential to reduce the climate and material cost by up to 20%. Considering the large number of SSC-Bridges that are built, this is an efficient way to reduce the climate impact when building these bridges in the future.