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Hydraulic steel structures, especially lock gates, play an important role in inland waterway transport infrastructure. Navigation lock gates are normally designed to last for 100 years. However, after a few decades of operation, many welded joints of steel mitre gates may suffer deterioration and unexpected failures, occurring primarily due to fatigue. As emergency repairs are costly, time-consuming and disruptive, optimising the operation and maintenance plans of mitre gates is necessary. Risk-based inspection planning has been used for marine structures but is seldom applied to inland navigation lock gates. In this paper, a procedure is proposed for inspecting welded joints using observed water levels. Optimal inspection plans are then evaluated by risk analysis, combining failure probabilities and associated expected costs for different events. A mitre gate is used to illustrate the procedure. It was found that the total expected cost of inspections performed at regular time intervals was generally higher than inspections performed when a certain annual failure probability threshold was reached.

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