ABSTRACT
In the face of the limited development of the transport infrastructure, maintaining the condition of the existing structures is becoming more and more important. The majority of structures are made of reinforced or prestressed concrete. Due to their intensive use and the harsh environmental conditions, they are exposed to increased aging. This results in a progressive form of degradation. The application of durable repairs at the optimum time for rehabilitation is a key challenge. The decision to select repairs is often made under unclear conditions. The information from preliminary investigations can be misinterpreted in many ways and the reduction to purely visually detectable damage can lead to wrong conclusions. The aim is to use systematized damage assessments to make decisions on the type of repair more objective and focused on scientific knowledge and expertise. Using a multimodal approach to measure the degradation of reinforced concrete components, the assessment is systematized so that the condition is always objective, comprehensive, and accurate. For this purpose, the results obtained from preliminary investigations are transformed into four damage classes and an objective and by weighting representative condition index. The developed fuzzy logic decision algorithm uses the condition index as input parameter for the selection of optimal repair methods. Hence, this assessment methodology is Fuzzy-Logic (FL), which treats and combines input data in not clear-cut borderlines to choose an optimal maintenance measure. A case study will proof the method to deal with lack of knowledge and uncertainty in this fuzzy decision process.
