NA - Bilateral Development of Reliability-based Assessment Methods for Efficient Maintenance of Ageing Infrastructure

Ageing infrastructure poses significant liability in terms of maintenance and safety. Due to the vast investments in infrastructure in recent decades, considerable resources must be committed to maintain safe bridges, buildings, offshore installations, et c. Traditionally, the maintenance and repair strategies rely on judgment rather than refined assessments that balance cost and safety. However, it is becoming apparent that significant cost savings are possible when reliability-based techniques are implem ented to optimize the monitoring and maintenance decisions, as exemplified in the Project Description. Due to the similarity in infrastructure and deterioration processes in certain countries it is argued that international collaboration would leverage the growing research efforts directed at ageing infrastructure. In particular, the similar infrastructure and environment in Norway and Canada strongly motivates bilateral research in this area. The proposed project explores the feasibility and benefits o f bilateral research along three axes: team building, pre-study, and support solicitation. The team building includes the assembly of researchers and students in Norway and Canada to carry out the pre-study and the support solicitation, as well as future projects. The pre-study phase includes a literature study to identify relevant efforts in the field, as well as exposing the state-of-practice in companies and agencies that manages infrastructure. This phase also comprises the documentation of benefits o f bilateral research. The support solicitation phase is aimed at verifying the need for the proposed research and developing proposals. Visits to agencies such as Vegdirektoratet, Norway and the Ministry of Transportation, British Columbia to obtain feedb ack and possibly support committments are essential in this phase. The proposed bilateral collaboration ideally matches research strategies developed independently at NTNU and the University of British Columbia.