Maintenance and Safety of Aging Infrastructure

Abstract

The aim of this Special Session is to attract state-of-the-art papers that deal with the use of advanced computational and/or experimental techniques in damage and vulnerability assessment as well as maintenance and retrofitting of aging structures and infrastructures (buildings, bridges, lifelines, etc) for minimization of losses and life-cycle-cost. A deteriorating infrastructure leads to increased functioning costs and reduced safety and can lead to a catastrophic failure with devastating environmental, social and economic consequences. In contrast, well-maintained civil infrastructure can substantially increase a country’s competitiveness in a global economy and enhance resilience to adverse circumstances such as natural hazards (e.g., earthquakes, hurricanes and floods) and manmade disasters (e.g., vehicular collision and explosive blasts due to terrorists’ attacks).
Cost-competent maintenance and management of civil infrastructure requires balanced consideration of both the structure performance and the total cost accrued over the entire life-cycle. Another major problem is that the structure performance is usually reduced during its functioning due to environmental and other factors. Thus, current structural condition state is usually assessed by visual inspection or more advanced automatic structural health monitoring techniques. Furthermore, maintenance managers often require a list of prioritized maintenance interventions for civil infrastructure on an annual and/or long-term basis. Various unavoidable uncertainties associated with both randomness (i.e., aleatory uncertainty) and imperfect knowledge (i.e., epistemic uncertainty) play also a crucial role in management and maintenance of engineering systems. Taking into account the aforementioned issues, this Special Session aims to present the recent developments of lifecycle maintenance and management planning for deteriorating civil infrastructure considering simultaneously multiple and often competing criteria in terms of condition, safety and life-cycle cost.

Organizers

Dan M. Frangopol, Lehigh University, US, (dan.frangopol@lehigh.edu)
Yiannis Tsompanakis, Technical University of Crete, Greece