Optimal Maintenance Design-Oriented Nonprobabilistic Reliability Methodology for Existing Structures Under Static and Dynamic Mixed Uncertainties

Abstract

The performances of engineering structures are degrading in service and maintenance interventions can enhance the structural reliability and make sure that the structures are effectively functional. Engineering structures often exhibit obvious time cumulative effects due to multisource time-varying uncertainties including property degradation of materials, changeable environment conditions, and dynamic loading processes, which makes the reliability assessment and maintenance design much harder. In this paper, a new time-varying nonprobabilistic reliability-oriented optimal maintenance design method with the consideration of static and dynamic mixed uncertainties is proposed. The interval model is utilized to quantify the uncertain and time-varying characteristics and the structural reliability can be assessed combining the interval model and the first-passage theory. We try to establish a more general maintenance cost model enlightened by Frangopol's work under the nonprobabilistic system and the maintenance strategy including uncertainty assessment, reliability evaluation, and cost optimization is constructed. Three numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed methodology.