Human-Induced Vibration Serviceability: From Dynamic Load Measurement towards the Performance-Based Structural Design

Abstract

Since the well-known Millennium bridge accident happened at the beginning of this century, both researchers and engineers realized that the human-induced vibration may lead to unaffordable consequences. Although such vibrations hardly threaten the safety of the structure, the large vibration may affect the functionalities of the structure, causing the serviceability problem. The first study on the human-induced vibration serviceability problem started from the measurement of human-induced load, with many mathematical models proposed. The strong randomness of the measured data led to the investigation on the randomness feature of the load. With the research going deeper, the phenomenon of human–structure interaction was found, which attracted the researchers to study the randomness of the human body dynamic properties that may affect the structural response. Once the interaction mechanism and the system parameters became available, random vibration analysis methods could be proposed to calculate human-induced random vibration, providing the foundation of the reliability analysis from the perspective of vibration serviceability. Such reliability is highly related to subjective feelings of the human body, which has also been deeply studied in the literature. Furthermore, the purpose of studying the dynamic reliability is to conduct the reliability-based structural design. This paper provides a review of the research on human-induced vibration serviceability following the above logic, from the first attempt on load measurement towards the modern techniques for performance-based vibration serviceability design.