Life-cycle assessment of marine civil engineering structures

Adequate structural safety should be ensured by proper design, fabrication and operation as well as by appropriate quality assurance and control throughout the life-cycle. The focus of this paper is to determine the design, inspection and repair procedures required to ensure satisfactory safety with respect to degradation. Design and inspection criteria are specified in codes in a generic manner. Hence, particular features of individual structures revealed during fabrication and operation need to be accounted for in updating inspections plans. In this regard, fatigue cracks are of special concern. Recent efforts to establish rational, reliability-based procedures for life-cycle assessment of fixed offshore platforms are outlined. The implication of gross errors which affect the initial crack size of welded structures is especially discussed.