ABSTRACT
Modeling structural degradation is an essential component of life-cycle cost analysis. Comprehensive models need to consider parameters and processes that are difficult to estimate and describe analytically. In particular, due to the probabilistic nature of degradation, there are several quantities associated with the stochastic process that do not have a closed form solution. For instance, damage accumulation due to shocks often requires computing the convolution of non-exponential distributions. Within this context, Phase type (PH) distributions appear as a very valuable alternative to handle these complexities. In this paper we present the basic formulation of the degradation problem and an approximation using Phase type distributions. The results are very encouraging and open new research opportunities for modeling structural degradation.
