Construction Reliability

Book excerpt: This book provides answers to the following problems: how to identify the most probable critical failures; how to describe and use data-concerning materials that are either heterogeneous, time-variant, or space-variant; how to quantify the reliability and lifetime of a system; how to use feedback information to actualize reliability results; and how to optimize an inspection politic or a maintenance strategy. Numerous authors from public research centers and firms propose a synthesis of methods, both new and well-known, and offer numerous examples concerning dams, geotechnical study, and structures from nuclear and civil engineering.