Scope Many transport infrastructures, historic buildings and other constructions built with different construction materials are located in a coastal or marine environment. These constructions are very relevant to the economic life/sustainability of the countries and regions which they serve and are therefore construction heritage . Common pathologies of construction materials in coastal and marine environments (by corrosion, biological attacks, leaching and other chemical reactions) can induce structural, functional or aesthetics degradation of these structures. Such degradation in most cases results in a loss of serviceability at an elemental or global level of the structure. Owners are therefore confronted with questions concerning the time to initiate maintenance/rehabilitation and the extent to which these actions should be carried out. To adequately address these questions, owner/managers of structures must have tools for diagnosis of damage, modelling the time evolution of the damage and optimisation of costs with respect to the extent of the repair/rehabilitation on the structures. Such tools must also allow managers to decide about the time of intervention in order to optimise whole life costs for individual structures or networks.
|