Civil engineering structures play an important role in any country for improving the economy together with the social and environmental welfare. An unwanted failure might cause significant impacts at different levels for the structure owner and for users. Fatigue is one of the main degradation processes on steel structures that causes structural failure before the end of the designed service life. To avoid unexpected failures due to fatigue, a comprehensive structural Life Cycle Management (LCM) is required to minimize the life-cycle cost and maximize the structural service life. One of the main objectives within the LCM can be related to optimizing the structural maintenance planning. Achieving this goal is a challenging task which requires to address some challenges such as predicting the structural performance under uncertainty, employing Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) data to reduce uncertainties, taking into account crack propagation behavior for given components, reliability and cost-informed decision making, and effect of maintenance actions among others. Accordingly, following contributions are considered in this research to improve the capabilities of structural LCM which are explained shortly in the sequel.Developing a new time-dependent reliability method for fatigue reliability analysis.Investigating the effectiveness of advanced crack propagation tools to study unwanted fatigue cracking problems and characterizing some possible repair actions on a real case study.Introducing the assumptions and simplification steps required to integrate the proposed time-dependent reliability method with crack propagation models to approximate the time-dependent fatigue reliability.As the first contribution of this thesis, a new time-dependent reliability method called AK-SYS-t is proposed. This method provides an efficient and accurate tool to evaluate time-dependent reliability of a component compared to other available methods. AK-SYS-t relates the time-dependent reliability to system reliability problems and tries to exploit the efficient system reliability methods such as AK-SYS towards time-dependent reliability analysis. It is worth mentioning that time-dependent reliability analysis is necessary in this context since the performance deterioration (such as fatigue) is a time-dependent process associated with time-dependent parameters such as fatigue loading.Another related topic is the study of crack propagation phenomenon with advanced modeling tools such as Finite Element Method (FEM) and eXtended Finite Element Method (XFEM). For illustration purposes, the crack in the root of a fillet weld is considered (common fatigue detail in bridges with orthotropic deck plates). One important issue investigated herein is the influence of the transversal tension in the deck plate on the direction of the crack propagation. It is shown how increasing the transversal tension in the deck plate may change the crack propagation towards the deck plate. Such cracks are considered dangerous since they are hard to inspect and detect. In the end, XFEM is used to investigate the effectiveness of two possible repair solutions.A supplementary contribution is related to introducing the required steps in order to integrate the newly developed time-depend reliability method with crack propagation problems through some applicational examples. This is a challenging task since performing the time-dependent reliability analysis for such problems requires a cycle-by-cycle calculation of stress intensity factors which requires huge computational resources. Therefore, the aim here is to introduce the assumptions and simplification steps in order to adopt the AK-SYS-t for fatigue reliability analysis. Accordingly, two examples are considered. (...)
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