Deterioration and maintenance models for insuring safety of civil infrastructures at lowest life - cycle cost 1

The purpose of the paper is to describe and compare deterioration and maintenance models for civil infrastructures. These models can be applied to determine the best maintenance strategy to insure an adequate level of safety at minimal life-cycle cost while taking the uncertainties in the deterioration process into account. Without being complete, a time-dependent deterioration process can be modelled as a failure rate function, a Markov model, a stochastic process or a time-dependent reliability index. The pros and cons of the different models considered are discussed.