A Reliability-Based Early Warning System for Real-Time Monitoring on RC Buildings

Today there is an urgent need for effective monitoring whether for old buildings or new ones. While conventional early warning system for real-time monitoring is based on safety factor, this paper proposes a new reliability-based framework to monitor the safety of RC buildings probabilistically. The framework includes modeling resistance, predicting probability distribution of load effect, calculating reliability and setting reliability index threshold. The in-situ test data enables to update the resistance model through a Bayesian process. Meanwhile, the observed monitoring data predicts the probability distribution of load effect. FORM is used to calculate the reliability because the limit state function for real-time monitoring is linear and simple. This study shows that the reliability-based early warning system is of more scientific sense in quantifying the safety and may be applied to many engineering fields.