A Novel Service Life Prediction for Reinforced Concrete Infrastructure Systems

Abstract

Civil infrastructure is crucial for economic growth and prosperity. It is important to emphasize that a crisis situation exists in civil infrastructure, specifically public transportation infrastructure. As a result of aging, severe environmental conditions and deferred maintenance decisions, assets continuously deteriorate. Decisions related to infrastructure maintenance and rehabilitation depend not only on an asset’s current condition, but on their predicted performance behavior with time as well. Infrastructure systems management plans consist of assessing the performance of the different components, predicting future performance of the components, then integrating the performance of the components into one performance of the system. Previous research has developed structural performance curves using reliability-based cumulative Weibull function for individual components of reinforced concrete infrastructure. This paper focuses on developing series and parallel system modeling techniques in order to construct structural performance or service life curves for the whole infrastructure system. The model is applied to subway stations and tunnels. Data are collected from the Société de Transport de Montréal (STM) inspection reports. The developed model is applied to a network segment of the STM subway network. Results show that system deterioration rates are between 2% and 3% per year. The remaining useful service life is predicted to be the year 2076 for renovated stations. This research is relevant to industry practitioners and researchers since it develops service life curves for subway stations and tunnels as typical infrastructure systems.