TOWARDS THE SYSTEM OF INSPECTION AND ANALYSIS FOR EVIDENCE-BASED STRUCTURAL PERFORMANCE EVALUATION —MESSAGE TO ENGINEERS DIRECTED TOWARDS MAINTENANCE FOR THE PURPOSE OF INSPECTION—

Abstract

 The current practice of performance evaluation on existing structures is mainly based on material degradation aspects. Although this evaluation is generally on the safe side, rational improvement is necessitated through the quantitative assessment of degradation impacts. On the other hand, enormous inspection data recently being available ranges widely as a nature from representing “structure symptom” to utilized as “model input”, and most data is solely an indirect index for the satisfaction level of required performance. Under such circumstances, the reliability of performance evaluation depends inevitably on an engineer’s competence. This paper reports about state of the art on the systemic practice among inspection, analysis, and performance evaluation, and we propose future directions through the experiences of blind structural performance evaluation, towards the further improvement and implementation of evidence-based quantitative structural performance evaluation.