Research On New Methods Of Evaluating The Reliability Of Existing Structures

The uncertain factors that influence the reliability of existing structures are studied in this paper in detail. The main factors used for evaluating the existing structures are quantized properly on the basis of Chinese Code and experience of engineering and used for the input indexes. In this paper two new methods that evaluate the reliability of existing structures are presented. They are artificial neural networks (ANN) method and grey cluster method.At last engineering examples are given to illustrate the two new methods proposed in this paper are practicable, quite simple and efficient. And there are a lot of works to be done to perfect the methods and extend the range of its application further.