The prediction of a realistic life cycle and the extension of the service life is an important task in reducing costs of civil engineering structures in the future. The paper first gives an overview of the necessary steps of the overall procedure of a precise life cycle assessment. The knowledge of the existing, inherent damage of a structure is an essential prerequisite for life cycle prediction. A theoretical and an experimental approach to determine the inherent damage is described. The paper concludes with the presentation of a fairly precise method to assess the fatigue life cycle of steel bridges. The methods are developed besides others at the Collaborative-Research-Center “Monitoring of Structures” at the Technical University at Braunschweig, Germany.
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Udo Peil (2005) studied this question.