Risk assessment and life prediction of complex engineering systems

摘要

Many complex engineering systems will exceed their design life expectancy within the next 10 to 15 years. It is also expected that these systems must be maintained and operated beyond their design life. This paper presents a integrated approach for managing the risks associated with aging effects and predicting the residually expectancy these systems. The approach unifies risk assessment, enhanced surveillance and testing, and robust computational models to assess the risk, predict age, and develop a life-extension management procedure. It also relies on the state of the art in life-extension and risk assessment methods from the nuclear power industry. Borrowing from the developments in decision analysis, this approach should systematically identify the options available for managing the existing aging systems beyond their intended design life.