Maintenance and Safety of Aging Infrastructure

"This book presents the latest scientific research and application practice findings in the engineering field of "maintenance and safety of aging infrastructure." The selected invited contributions will provide an overview of the use of advanced computational and/or experimental techniques in damage and vulnerability assessment as well as maintenance and retrofitting of aging structures and infrastructures (buildings, bridges, lifelines, etc) for minimization of losses and life-cycle-cost. Cost-competentmaintenance and management of civil infrastructure requires balanced consideration of both the structure performance and the total cost accrued over the entire life-cycle. Another major problem is that the structure performance is usually reduced during its functioning due to environmental and other factors. Thus, current structural condition state is usually assessed by visual inspection or more advanced automatic structural health monitoring techniques. Furthermore, maintenance managers often require alist of prioritized maintenance interventions for civil infrastructure on an annual and/or long-term basis. Various unavoidable uncertainties associated with both randomness (i.e., aleatory uncertainty) and imperfect knowledge (i.e., epistemic uncertainty) also play a crucial role in management and maintenance of engineering systems. Taking into account the aforementioned issues, this volume aims to present the recent developments of life-cycle maintenance and management planning for deteriorating civil infrastructure considering simultaneously multiple and often competing criteria in terms of condition, safety and life-cycle cost"--

Professor Dan M. Frangopol is the first holder of the Fazlur R. Khan Endowed Chair of Structural Engineering and Architecture at Lehigh University. His main research interests are in the application of probabilistic concepts and methods to civil and marine engineering, including structural reliability, probability-based design and optimization of buildings, bridges and naval ships, structural health monitoring, life-cycle performance maintenance and management of structures and infrastructures under uncertainty, risk-based assessment and decision making, infrastructure resilience to disasters, and stochastic mechanics. Prof. Frangopol is the Founding President of the International Association for Bridge Maintenance and Safety (IABMAS) and of the International Association for Life Cycle Civil Engineering (IALCCE). He is also the founder of the recently created ASCE-SEI Technical Council on life-cycle performance, safety, reliability and risk of structural systems. He has held numerous leadership positions in national and international professional societies. Prof. Frangopol is the Founding Editor of Structure and Infrastructure Engineering an international peer-reviewed journal. He is also the Founding Editor of the Book Series Structures and Infrastructures. Prof. Frangopol is the author or co-author of more than 300 books, book chapters, and refereed journal articles, and more than 500 papers in conference proceedings. He has edited or co-edited 34 books. Prof. Frangopol has supervised the dissertations of 35 Ph.D. students (seven under current supervision) and the thesis and reports of 50 M.S. students. Many of his former students are university professors in the United States and abroad, and several are prominent in professional practice and research laboratories.

Dr Yiannis Tsompanakis completed his studies (diploma in civil engineering and PhD in computational mechanics) in NTUA, and afterwards he is lecturing in Technical University of Crete (TUC), firstly as a visiting professor (2000-2003) and since 9/2003 as an Assistant Professor and since 9/2010 as an Associate Professor of Structural Dynamics in the Department of Applied Sciences of TUC having a permanent academic employment in TUC. He is expert in development and application of advanced computational models for the numerical simulation structures and infrastructures. His research interests include structural and geotechnical earthquake engineering, geoenvironmental engineering, dynamic soil-structure-fluid interaction, foundations and retaining structures, structural optimization, probabilistic mechanics, structural assessment and retrofitting as wells as artificial intelligence methods in engineering. He has over 150 publications (journal papers, conference papers, book chapters, edited books and journal special issues and conference proceedings. He has organized several conferences and minisymposia. He has participated in many research (Greek and EU) projects as researcher and/or coordinator. Dr Tsompanakis has excellent leadership, interpersonal and negotiating skills and many cooperations with other scientific groups in Greece, USA, UK, Italy, Germany, Serbia, etc. He is reviewer in many archival scientific engineering journals and member of the Editorial Board in several scientific journals. He is the Technical Editor of Structure and Infrastructure Engineering (SIE) Journal, Taylor&Francis Publ. He is the co-editor of the first two volumes in the same Taylor & Francis book series: “Structures & Infrastructures Book Series”, Book Series Editor Dan M. Frangopol.