Redundancy Measure and Its Application to the Design and Maintenance of Marine Structures

This paper is a survey of the state-of-the-art knowledge in structural redundancy measure and its application. The existing deterministic and probabilistic measures of structural redundancy are summarized. Emphasis is given to the discussion of their advantages and limitations. The application bf damage tolerance concept in the design and maintenance of marine structures is also reviewed. Some most critical problems in structural redundancy are proposed for future research.

Review on Application of Artificial Intelligence in Civil Engineering

In last few years,big data and deep learning technologies have been successfully applied in various fields of civil engineering with the great progress of machine learning techniques.However,until now,there has been no comprehensive review on its applications in civil engineering.To fill this gap,this paper reviews the application and development of artificial intelligence in civil engineering in recent years,including intelligent algorithms,big data and deep learning.Through the work of this paper,the research direction and difficulties of artificial intelligence in civil engineering for the past few years can be known.It is shown that the studies of artificial intelligence in civil engineering mainly focus on structural maintenance and management,and the design optimization.

Overview and outlook on railway track stiffness measurement

Stiffness is one of the basic performance parameters for railway track. The efficient and accurate stiffness measurement has been considered as the foundation for further development of railway engineering, and therefore has great theoretical and practical significance. Based on a summary of the connotation and measurement of track stiffness, the state of the art of measurement methods for track stiffness was analyzed systematically. The standstill measurement of track stiffness can be performed with the traditional jack-loading method, impact hammer method, FWD （falling weight deflectometer） method, and track loading vehicle method. Although these methods can be adopted in stiffness measurement for a section of railway track, they are not desirable owning to small range and low efficiency. In the recent 20 years, researchers have proposed many methods like unbalancedloading laser displacement method, deflection basin deformation rate method, and eccentricity excitation method to continuously measure track stiffness; however, these methods have drawbacks like poor accuracy, low speed, and insufficient data analysis. In this work, the merits and demerits of these methods were summarized, and optimization suggestions were presented. Based on the wave transmission mechanism and principle of vibration energy harvesting, an overall conception on continuous measurement of stiffness and long-term stiffness monitoring for special sections was proposed.

A cost driven predictive maintenance policy for structural airframe maintenance

Airframe maintenance is traditionally performed at scheduled maintenance stops.The decision to repair a fuselage panel is based on a fixed crack size threshold,which allows to ensure the aircraft safety until the next scheduled maintenance stop.With progress in sensor technology and data processing techniques,structural health monitoring（SHM） systems are increasingly being considered in the aviation industry.SHM systems track the aircraft health state continuously,leading to the possibility of planning maintenance based on an actual state of aircraft rather than on a fixed schedule.This paper builds upon a model-based prognostics framework that the authors developed in their previous work,which couples the Extended Kalman filter（EKF） with a firstorder perturbation（FOP） method.By using the information given by this prognostics method,a novel cost driven predictive maintenance（CDPM） policy is proposed,which ensures the aircraft safety while minimizing the maintenance cost.The proposed policy is formally derived based on the trade-off between probabilities of occurrence of scheduled and unscheduled maintenance.A numerical case study simulating the maintenance process of an entire fleet of aircrafts is implemented.Under the condition of assuring the same safety level,the CDPM is compared in terms of cost with two other maintenance policies：scheduled maintenance and threshold based SHM maintenance.The comparison results show CDPM could lead to significant cost savings.