ADVANCED MONTE CARLO SIMULATION FOR THE ROBUST DESIGN AND MAINTENANCE OF FATIGUE-PRONE METALLIC COMPONENTS

摘要

The design of inspection schedules is a complex optimization problem that requires the reliability to be assessed. The solution to this problem can be found balancing the costs associated to inspection/repair activities against the benefits related to the faultless operation of the infrastructure. The optimization aims at minimizing the total cost, obtained as the combination of maintenance and failure costs, by tuning some design parameters, such as the number, time and quality of inspections. The optimization problem is formulated as a time-dependent reliability-based optimization problem. The solution to this problem represents a real technological challenge, as the reliability assessment is a computationally intensive task, which may take up to few days on last generation processors. In this paper, an efficient and generally applicable numerical technique, which is capable of producing a solution in a very short amount of time (less than 1 hour), is proposed. The efficiency and accuracy of the proposed technique is shown by means of a literature example involving a fatigue-prone weld in a bridge girder.