ASCE has honored the writing team of Yan Liu, Ph.D., and Dan M. Frangopol, Sc.D., P.E., Dist.M.ASCE, with the 2020 Raymond C. Reese Research Prize for their paper “Utility and Information Analysis for Optimum Inspection of Fatigue-Sensitive Structures,” published in the February 2019 issue of the Journal of Structural Engineering.
This paper makes a significant contribution to the design of an optimum decision-making framework that schedules future structural inspections on the basis of achieving maximum information utility to decision-makers. Decision-makers may have different preferences and attitudes toward obtaining inspection information at certain points in the service life of fatigue-sensitive structures. In the nominated paper, the authors adopt the utility concept applied to inspection information for decision-making purposes in order to achieve the best-informed decision. Probabilistic inspection detectability affected by different inspection methods is synthetized into a time-variant utility analysis model.
The Raymond C. Reese Research Prize is awarded to the author or authors of a paper that describes a notable achievement in research related to structural engineering.
