Preventive maintenance of wood-framed buildings for hurricane preparedness

This paper presents a time-dependent reliability modeling and optimal maintenance planning approach for residential buildings subject to hurricane winds. A gamma process is employed to model the stochastic degradation of building components. The time-dependent fragility function and the failure probability of the roof system obtained from the degradation model are used to determine the retrofit timing of components that optimize an average cost per cycle time. The method is illustrated on determining the retrofit times of roof-to-wall connections based on actual component failure and hurricane wind load data. Effectiveness of the optimal retrofit age is compared to a replacement based on time-invariant failure probabilities. A simulation approach is presented to quantify the effect of wind speed uncertainty on maintenance cost.