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DECISION MAKING FOR REQUALIFICATION OF STRUCTURES

Objective


The overall achievement of the project is the improvement of the decision making related to the requalification of "older" structures in the offshore, bridges and power plants areas. Therefore, a methodology was developed, in which structural and/or mechanical integrity is the governing criterion, however other more qualitative criteria are also considered simultaneously. Furthermore, for the automation of the process, a set of engineering (software) tools handling several related problems has been developed.

The most innovative achievement of the project has been the development of multi-criteria decision analysis techniques which take into account various types of uncertainties involved in the evaluation of the decision criteria and constraints. Starting from the three separate well established decision techniques: Multi-Criteria Decision Methods (MCDM) namely
a) the deterministic criteria,
b) the fuzzy decision analysis with a single criterion involving "fuzzy" uncertainty, and
c) the bayesian decision analysis with a single criterion involving "stochastic" uncertainty,
have been developed through combining and merging them with either joint utility functions or the AHP method.

These developments have provided a comprehensive methodology for problems which may be encountered in practice. Guidelines have been provided to assist the users in the selection of a particular method for the problem being considered.

The project has been very successful in achieving its principal objective of providing a rational basis for decision-making for requalification of existing structures. A decision-theoretic framework has been proposed for requalification and innovative methods have been developed for decision analysis within this framework. The applicability and benefits of the developed methods have been demonstrated through a number of realistic examples. Finally, the developed methods have been implemented into an intelligent software system. The exploitation potential of the results is large (spin-off products commercialised already at the end of the project, exploitation agreement achieved) and the European collaboration pattern established in the project involving seven countries and several industrial areas stable.

The results of the BE5935 project and of the RESTRUCT software offer an excellent basis for development of these dedicated software systems in single DSS for each area of these area of application.
The proposed research tackles the problem of decision-making for the requalification of existing ("old", "geriatric") structures and structural components in various fields of industry, taking bridges, power plants and offshore structures as examples. In particular, it tackles question like "what to do with the old plant/component" where the corresponding answers (e.g. "replace, repair, use-as-is...") heavily depend on the random nature of many physical phenomena involved, as well as on the uncertain nature of various engineering and non-engineering parameters that govern the use of these structures. Although a lot of relevant research has been done already, its application to practical structural engineering decisions still and by far does not meet the actual needs. Lack of such decision aid tools is particularly apparent in management of large industrial plants where a wrong or unoptimized decision can cause extreme consequences.

The main goal of this project is to make a major step towards the solution of these problems mainly by:

- developing (customizing) a rational engineering methodology and
- developing the corresponding set of engineering tools for decision making related to the requalification of target structures,

taking into account not only the structural and/or mechanical integrity as the governing criterion, but also other, often very qualitative criteria (like the environmental ones or, e.g. "image of the company"). Within the project, the "engineering" decision making methodologies will thus be developed and then tested in the three target fields of application. The improved decision making is expected to bring important technical, environmental and economical benefits (a typical repair on an offshore platforms amounts to several dozen million ECUs and typical repair/replace decisions related to yearly revisions of piping systems in power plants involve usually several million ECUs.

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Funding Scheme

CSC - Cost-sharing contracts

Coordinator

Staatliche Materialprüfungsanstalt
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Address
Pfaffenwaldring 32
70569 Stuttgart
Germany

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Last update: 8 August 1993

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Permalink: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/BRE20329

European Union, 2024