SIPTA Seminar by Patelli, Faes and Cicirello: Engineering and IP: what's going on?

ABSTRACT: Engineers design components, structures and systems and plan activities to extend their service lives despite a limited understanding of the underlying physics and/or the availability of sufficient informative data. A big challenge is to deal with unknown and uncontrollable variables such as changes on the environmental conditions, deliberated threats, change of intended use, etc. As a result of this, large safety factors are usually adopted in order to mitigate the use of approximate methods and deal with uncertainty. Often the methods for dealing with uncertainty assume a complete knowledge of the underlying stochastic process. This wide availability of information is however rarely the case in practice. Although imprecise probability offers the tools to cope with lack of knowledge and data, it is not largely adopted in practice. One of the main reasons is the lack of accessible and efficient tools, both analytical and numerical, for uncertainty quantification. On top, there exists still a lack of awareness of the potential capabilities of imprecise probability theory and its applications. In this seminar, we are presenting the challenges in the application of imprecise probability to practical engineering problems These challenges have been the driver for several novel algorithms and approaches that are going to be presented.

Contents
00:00 - Intro
04:51 - Numerical methods in engineering
08:09 - Patelli: Requirements and challenges
31:10 - Faes: Computations with IP in numerical models
49:47 - Cicirello: Remaining useful life assessment under sparse noisy data
01:13:08 - Why is IP not (yet) widely used in engineering?