Bayesian strategies in reliability assessment of heritage structures

Reliability assessment of heritage structures is becoming an increasingly important and frequent engineering task. Probabilistic methods and Bayesian updating techniques are often combined to obtain realistic estimates, also aiming to target at the best the possible interventions. Moreover, several factors often contribute to complicate the probabilistic approach: among the others, uncertainties about the knowledge of mechanical properties of materials, due to lack of quantitative data from the structure. In this paper, a strategy to perform a Bayesian updating in assessing heritage structures, based on qualitative a posteriori judgment is proposed, where probability distribution function for material properties are updated on the base of information available on similar structures. A case study, concerning a relevant historical building is finally presented.