The effect of interactions between failure mechanisms on the reliability of flood defenses

Johannes C. Pol, Paulina Kindermann, Mark G. van der Krogt, Vera M. van Bergeijk, Guido Remmerswaal, Willem Kanning, Sebastiaan N. Jonkman and Matthijs Kok

Reliability Engineering and System Safety, 2023, vol. 231, issue C

Abstract: Structural reliability analysis often considers failure mechanisms as correlated but non-interacting processes. Interacting failure mechanisms affect each others performance, and thereby the system reliability. We describe such interactions in the context of flood defenses, and analyze under which conditions such interactions have a large impact on reliability using a Monte Carlo-based quantification method. We provide simple examples and an application to levee failure due to landward slope instability and backward erosion piping (BEP). The examples show that the largest interaction effects are expected when the trigger mechanism is relatively likely to occur and the affected mechanism has a relatively large contribution to the system reliability. For the studied levee example, interactions between slope instability and BEP increased the failure probability up to a factor 4. Implications for the assessment and design of flood defenses are discussed.

Keywords: Reliability; Interaction; Failure mechanisms; Flood defenses; Slope instability; Backward erosion piping (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0951832022006020
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:reensy:v:231:y:2023:i:c:s0951832022006020

DOI: 10.1016/j.ress.2022.108987

Access Statistics for this article

Reliability Engineering and System Safety is currently edited by Carlos Guedes Soares

More articles in Reliability Engineering and System Safety from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().