For the last decade, the EU countries has been working intensively on creation developmental and sustainable transport strategies at the national and international level, which requires, besides analysing economical and ecological implications, implications on traffic-regulations, and also the analyzing the impact of different transport strategies on transport infrastructure.
It is realistic to expect that in the near future, both the carrying capacity of road vehicles and the density of traffic will increase.
This fact imposes to the traffic infrastructure increasing demands in terms of capacity and bearing capacity. Particularly critical points of the transport infrastructure are bridges, especially those built several decades ago because they are designed according to different traffic requirements and applicable standards at the time.
Having in mind the fact that traffic is stochastic, and that experimentation on the real systems is not justified by safety and functional criteria, application of traffic microsimulation modeling is a logical choice. In this paper, the possibility of using microsimulation of traffic in the analysis of the traffic load of the selected bridge is examined through the generation of various potentially critical traffic scenarios within the existing but also for the future assumed traffic load. This paper does not include an analysis of accidental traffic situations or scenarios where sudden braking of the vehicle occurs, as well as traffic accidents and vehicle collision with another vehicle or bridge elements. The application of this method is shown in the example of the road bridge "Dr. Franjo Tuđman "across the river Drava in Osijek, built in 1995.

traffic load, bridge, microsimulations, VISSIM