Practical methods of structural reliability
conference paper
When designing and maintaining structures, decisions must be made with respect to dimen-sions, materials, repairs or strengthening and maintenance. In general, one wants to find an optimal decision, maximizing the service life benefits including costs of construction, repair maintenance and costs of unde-sired behaviour. These decisions have to be made without exact knowledge of about many parameters, such as actions and structural properties. An efficient framework for dealing with such situations is the probabilis-tic decision theory. The depth and details of the analysis depend on the problem, but the principles are always the same. In many cases, it is sufficient to use code type design methods with help of partial factors. It is how-ever, essential that the codes have been calibrated to clear reliability targets. In other cases, like special struc-tures or complex assessment situations, it might be helpful to use the Structural Reliability Theory directly. This paper presents the available models and methods as well as the corresponding design philosophy and possible strategies that can be used in both cases. The paper follows, by and large, the lines of the Probabilis-tic Model Code, as developed by the Joint Committee on Structural Safety (JCSS).
TNO Identifier
331364
Source title
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on the Application of Statistics and Probability, ICASP 10, Japan, August 2007
Files
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