Reliability and Life-Cycle Analysis of Deteriorating Systems

Engineering decisions for long term performance of systems.- Reliability of engineered systems.- Basics of stochastic processes, point and marked point processes.- Degradation: data analysis and analytical modeling.- Continuous state degradation models.- Discrete state degradation models.- A generalized approach to degradation.- Systematically reconstructed systems.

Mauricio Sánchez-Silva: I am a Professor of the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at Los Andes University in Bogotá, Colombia. I received his B.S. in Civil engineering and his MSc in Civil Engineering at Los Andes University; and my Ph.D. in Civil Engineering at Bristol University, UK. My main areas of research are: applied probability (risk and reliability evaluation), life-cycle analysis and physical and stochastic modelling of degrading systems; which are all related with the topic of the proposed book. I have been working as a faculty (Academic staff) for 17 years (after my PhD). During these years in academia I have taught both graduate and undergraduate courses in Civil and Industrial Engineering. Graduate courses focus mainly on risk and reliability problems, mostly related to Civil and Mechanical systems. As a result of my graduate course in Risk and Reliability problems and the work with the industry, I have written a book called [In Spanish]: Introducción a la Confiabilidad y Evaluación de Riesgos [Introduction to Risk and Reliability Analysis] 484 pages and ISBN: 978-958-695-511-9. 5). The two editions of the book have been printed by the University Editorial Office (Ediciones Uniandes).

During the last 5 years I have taught a graduate course on Analysis of Infrastructure Systems; a course that inspire partly the development of this book. The result of my research has led to the publication of 7 book chapters, over 50 Journal papers and 80 conference papers, most of them related to infrastructure problems such as degradation (e.g., chloride ingress in concrete, biodegradation, stochastic modelling), maintenance (optimum maintenance policies), risk and reliability assessment and network modelling. In addition I have been involved in several projects with different industrial sectors (e.g., oil industry; disaster management offices), which involve risk and reliability assessments and the evaluation of infrastructure's performance over time.