RELIABILITY ASSESSMENT AND ASSURANCE OF INFRASTRUCTURE SYSTEMS

The Hanshin earthquake (the Hyogoken-Nanbu earthquake) caused tremendo us losses of life and property mainly due to the failure of civil engi neering facilities. The near-field ground motions derived some catastr ophic or multiple failures in the infrastructure systems which had not been observed with previous earthquakes. The disaster provided us of a valuable lesson to re-recognize the importance of reliability assess ment and assurance of infrastructure systems. In this paper, some cons ideration and discussion will be presented on the role and effect of s tructural redundancy for the reliability assurance of the infrastructu re systems. (C) 1998 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights res erved.