A Model for Predicting Remaining Service Life of Existing Structures

Service life prediction is an important aspect of structural safety evaluation. Based on periodical or non-periodical testing results of existing structures, some comprehensive evaluation indices of time series can be obtained by reliability assessment or other evaluation methods. For the problem of remaining service life prediction, existing structures can be regarded as grey systems. Combined with periodical and non-periodical testing results of existing structures, grey system prediction method is applied to predict the tendency of comprehensive evaluation indices of time series and further predict the remaining service life of existing structures in the present paper. The comprehensive evaluation index of existing structures can be obtained by reliability assessment or other evaluation methods. In the present paper, a structural damage index is proposed which can be obtained by comprehensive evaluation. Two numerical examples are given to show the procedure of the model.