Optimal planning of structural performance monitoring based on reliability importance assessment

Recently, the effective use of information from structural health monitoring (SHM) has been considered as a significant tool for rational maintenance planning of deteriorating structures. Since a realistic maintenance plan for civil infrastructure has to include uncertainty, reliable information from SHM should be used systematically. Continuous monitoring over a long-term period can increase the reliability of the assessment and prediction of structural performance. However, due to limited financial resources, cost-effective SHM should be considered. This paper provides an approach for cost-effective monitoring planning of a structural system, based on a time-dependent normalized reliability importance factor (NRIF) of structural components. The reliability of the system and the NRIFs of individual components are assessed and predicted based on monitored data. The total monitoring cost for the structural system is allocated to individual components according to the NRIF. These allocated monitoring costs of individual components are used in Pareto optimization to determine the monitoring schedules (i.e., monitoring duration and prediction duration). (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.