ABSTRACT
When assessing existing concrete structures, an adequate prediction of the time-dependent structural performance is crucial. Unfortunately, the degradation process is associated with large uncertainties and when executing additional investigations and measurements, significant model and measurement uncertainties play a dominant role in the reliability-based performance prediction. Bayesian updating techniques provide a unique engineering tool to adequately combine and fully exploit the power of combined available information, enabling to make inferences where classical statistical approaches fail. Among others, uncertainties on degradation parameters and variables in structural reliability calculations can be updated on the basis of combined information from measurements, monitoring and visual inspections. Even the effect of quality control can be taken into account. Consequently, these updated uncertainties can be taken into account in full-probabilistic structural reliability calculations, or partial factors for the structural verification can be adjusted according to the posterior probabilistic models. In this contribution, the integration of these approaches into the practical assessment process is briefly explained and an outlook is given on future engineering challenges to integrate such approaches further in the life-cycle assessment of existing concrete structures.
