ABSTRACT
The benefit of structural health monitoring (SHM) can possibly manifest through uncertainty reduction, risk reduction or life-cycle cost reduction. In the absence of a formal framework to establish monitoring benefits, SHM appears only as an additional cost to the stakeholders. This discourages the stakeholders from investing in health monitoring strategies. In the absence of a monetary value for the monitoring benefit, we rely on regulatory provisions to mandate effective structural health monitoring strategies. The value of information (VoI) is one such indicator that tries to formally quantify the benefits of monitoring, through its ability to arrive at optimum decisions with regards to the lifecycle management of structures. Broadly, VoI can be established through graphical methods or through a structural reliability based framework. In this paper, we briefly review the state-of-the-art on the VoI approach in structural engineering. Discussions are provided on the parameters that typically influence the VoI, followed by a case study example for VoI in fatigue cracking of steel structures. Calculations on sobol indices for the sensivitiy analysis help identify critical parameters affecting the VoI output.
