System Reliability Updating of Fatigue-Induced Sequential Failures

Abstract

Many structural systems are subjected to the risk of fatigue-induced failures caused by repeated loading during their service. For effective management of such risk, it is essential to estimate the reliability of a structure against fatigue-induced sequential failures and update the estimated reliability based on actual observations made during structural inspections. Despite much research effort dedicated to inspection-based reliability updating of structures, many previous studies aimed at updating the reliability estimates of individual structural members instead of system-level reliability. Moreover, such studies tend to focus on structures which show uniform stress distribution in discrete members such as truss. This paper proposes a new method to update the system-level reliability of a wide variety of structures under the risk of fatigue-induced sequential failures based on inspection results. The proposed