In the past few years, there has been an increasing societal and industrial demand for the reliable assessment and design of structural systems with service-life criteria of at least several decades. The life cycle characterisation of engineering structures in terms of an anticipated service life remains a significant aspect of sustainability in the construction industry. This requires special attention to the definition of structural performance under various actions, and to the implemented engineering materials and methods as well as to the inverse identification and monitoring of structural conditions. Subsequently, the focus remains on the development of a holistic performance-based design approach for new and existing structures and infrastructures. This paper presents the fundamental reliability concepts of performance-based design, with a focus on lifetime assessment. Case studies from actual structural components’ design are used to verify the proposed methodology and indicate the significance of quality assurance in the lifetime assessment of engineering structures. We also confirmed that reliability and quality assurance criteria are strongly connected. Therefore, a methodology for quality-based service life assessment is presented and elaborated in the case studies.

In the last years fiber reinforced elastomeric bearings (FREBs) acting as isolation devices have begun to replace bearings with steel reinforcement. To understand the behaviour of FREBs under seismic loads it is essential to investigate their relevant mechanical properties, effective shear modulus and equivalent damping ratio. The experimental investigation yielded some discrepancies between collected data and expected behaviour of the bearings. In order to investigate that disagreement, a numerical simulation approach focusing on capturing the visco-hyperelastic behaviour of the elastomeric material has been investigated. In addition, a method for the calibration of the material model is presented and validated. Moreover, the influence of vertical load, horizontal deflection, number of elastomeric and reinforcement layers and support type on the mechanical properties will be discussed.