Safety assessment of civil engineering structures throughout their life-cycle

The decision-making tools for life-cycle analysis should capture the degradation and retrofitting processes in order to support maintenance of structures. Most of the current approaches to the life-cycle analysis are based on more or less simplified mechanical models or formulas. A more realistic reliability analysis can be achieved using non-linear FEM modeling. The particular methodologies are available and have been verified in practice. In the presented work they are integrated into an innovative tool for safety assessment of engineering structures throughout whole their service life. The life-cycle analysis combines modeling of nonlinearities in material and structure and degradation effects including uncertainties involved in all these phenomena. As the nonlinear structural analysis used for realistic prediction of structural response is computationally very demanding, a suitable technique of statistical sampling is employed in order to allow relatively small number of simulations. The proposed methodology allows evaluating structural safety using reliability index during and after the degradation and retrofitting processes in order to calculate the safety level for the service life conditions.