Modeling time and spatial variability of degradation through gamma processes for structural reliability assessment

The objective of this work is to propose a spatio-temporal random field for assessing the effect of spatial variability on the degradation process in structural reliability assessment. Our model extends the classical Gamma process which is usually developed for degradation temporal variability concerns to integrate spatial variability and heterogeneity issues. A log-normal distributed spatial random scale is then introduced in the Gamma process. Mathematical models for a structure degradation in space and time and estimation procedures are developed in this paper. Approximations and simulations are given to evaluate the failure time distribution and to characterize the residual lifetime after inspection. Simulation results are performed using pseudo-random data based on Monte-Carlo simulations to fit the model and the inference of their parameters. The two proposed estimation method Method of Moments and Pseudo Maximum Likelihood are numerically compared according to statistical measures. The accuracy of the methods are also discussed by numerical examples given the approximations of quantities of interests.