Estimating the time-dependent reliability of aging structures in the presence of incomplete deterioration information

The performance of an aging structure is commonly evaluated under the framework of reliability analysis, where the uncertainties associated with the structural resistance and loads should be taken into account. In practical engineering, the probability distribution of resistance deterioration is often inaccessible due to the limits of available data, although the statistical parameters such as mean value and standard deviation can be obtained by fitting or empirical judgments. As a result, an error of structural reliability may be introduced when an arbitrary probabilistic distribution is assumed for the resistance deterioration. With this regard, in this paper, the amount of reliability error posed by different choices of deterioration distribution is investigated, and a novel approach is proposed to evaluate the averaged structural reliability under incomplete deterioration information, which does not rely on the probabilistic weight of the candidate deterioration models. The reliability for an illustrative structure is computed parametrically for varying probabilistic models of deterioration and different resistance conditions, through which the reliability associated with different deterioration models is compared, and the application of the proposed method is illustrated.