Abstract
Owners of structures and infrastructure base their maintenance decision schemes mainly on structural integrity assessment and consequence analysis. The major inputs come from information collected by inspections employing non-destructive or destructive tools. Uncertainties and errors of measurement can lead to bad decisions but these effects are rarely integrated into the decision making process. Risk Based Inspection (RBI) provides the basics for optimizing the maintenance plans of existing structures while ensuring satisfactory safety and availability of the structure during its service life. This basis depends both on computation of reliability index and probabilistic modeling of inspection results. Probabilistic modeling of inspection results leads to specifying the Probability of Detection (PoD), the Probability of False Alarms (PFA) and the Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC) curve that are usually considered as key parameters in RBI. Under these circumstances the comparison of Non destructive Testing (NDT) tools in terms of cost/benefit is difficult to be established as well as the method for optimizing a given technique. This paper starts from the αδ method that gives a new performance indicator in this context, and apply it to the field of inspection of steel harbor structures, after a detailed analysis of uncertainties during corrosion assessment by ultrasonic measurements.
Highlights
Replacement of engineering structures results in high economic and environmental costs, increasing the interest in maintaining these structures with efficient management plans
When inspection of existing structures is not perfect, it has become a common practice to model their reliability in terms of Probability of Detection (PoD), Probability of False Alarms (PFA) and Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curves [1,2,3]
These quantities are generally the main inputs needed by owners of structures who are looking to achieve the socalled IMR (Inspection, Maintenance and Repair) plans through Risk Based Inspection (RBI) methods [4,5,6]
Summary
Replacement of engineering structures results in high economic and environmental costs, increasing the interest in maintaining these structures with efficient management plans. When inspection of existing structures is not perfect, it has become a common practice to model their reliability in terms of Probability of Detection (PoD), Probability of False Alarms (PFA) and Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curves [1,2,3]. These quantities are generally the main inputs needed by owners of structures who are looking to achieve the socalled IMR (Inspection, Maintenance and Repair) plans through Risk Based Inspection (RBI) methods [4,5,6]. Several protocols of inspection of harbors steel structures are compared in this RBI context and the effects on risk assessment of an improvement of a protocol on the extra-costs are analyzed
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