Offshore structures are considered as fail safe and inspections are carried out during their service lifetime to assess their actual condition. In this paper, the effect of inspection updating on fatigue reliability of offshore structures is investigated. In particular, the effect of inspection on the reliability of both inspected and uninspected joints is assessed dependent upon the correlation of properties of different joints. The effect of repeated inspections and inspection sample size on fatigue reliability is also investigated. The influence of inspection of certain joints on the reliability of a series system is studied and the effect of system-based updating policy on fatigue reliability is investigated. It is found that the system reliability is significantly affected by the inspection updating policy. [S0892-7219(00)00403-9]

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