Framework for the optimization of structural health monitoring on a probabilistic basis

The safety and usability of structures is of great importance for the entire society, because disturbances in important elements of the everyday life (e.g. traffic networks) can have significant financial and environmental consequences. Especially in times when bad news about deteriorated structures and shortened public budgets are omnipresent, this must not be forgotten. Structural health monitoring (SHM) can help to ensure the safety of deteriorated structures. SHM is expensive and therefore the investigation of optimized inspection and monitoring strategies is an active field of research. The Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) 477 at the Braunschweig University of Technology investigates innovative methods for structural health monitoring (SHM). In project field At a framework for the probabilistic safety assessment of structures based on data from SHM is developed. With the help of this framework, structures are modeled with probabilistic methods. This paper describes and explains the methodology of the framework and shows the technique how data from the SHM process can be integrated into the probabilistic model of the structure and how A monitoring plan can be derived based on the results from the reliability analyses.