Containing papers presented at the 18th European Safety and Reliability Conference (Esrel 2009) in Prague, Czech Republic, September 2009, Reliability, Risk and Safety Theory and Applications will be of interest for academics and professionals working in a wide range of industrial and governmental sectors, including Aeronautics and Aerospace, Aut

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Safety, Reliability, Risk and Life-Cycle Performance of Structures and Infrastructures contains the plenary lectures and papers presented at the 11th International Conference on STRUCTURAL SAFETY AND RELIABILITY (ICOSSAR2013, New York, NY, USA, 16-20 June 2013), and covers major aspects of safety, reliability, risk and life-cycle performance of str

Reliability of Structures enables both students and practising engineers to appreciate how to value and handle reliability as an important dimension of structural design. It discusses the concepts of limit states and limit state functions, and presents methodologies for calculating reliability indices and calibrating partial safety factors. It also supplies information on the probability distributions and parameters used to characterize both applied loads and member resistances. This revised and extended second edition contains more discussions of US and international codes and the issues underlying their development. There is significant revision and expansion of the discussion on Monte Carlo simulation, along with more examples. The book serves as a textbook for a one-semester course for advanced undergraduates or graduate students, or as a reference and guide to consulting structural engineers. Its emphasis is on the practical applications of structural reliability theory rather than the theory itself. Consequently, probability theory is treated as a tool, and enough is given to show the novice reader how to calculate reliability. Some background in structural engineering and structural mechanics is assumed. A solutions manual is available upon qualifying course adoption.

The last decades have witnessed the development of methods for solving struc tural reliability problems, which emerged from the efforts of numerous re searchers all over the world. For the specific and most common problem of determining the probability of failure of a structural system in which the limit state function g( x) = 0 is only implicitly known, the proposed methods can be grouped into two main categories: • Methods based on the Taylor expansion of the performance function g(x) about the most likely failure point (the design point), which is determined in the solution process. These methods are known as FORM and SORM (First- and Second Order Reliability Methods, respectively). • Monte Carlo methods, which require repeated calls of the numerical (nor mally finite element) solver of the structural model using a random real ization of the basic variable set x each time. In the first category of methods only SORM can be considered of a wide applicability. However, it requires the knowledge of the first and second deriva tives of the performance function, whose calculation in several dimensions either implies a high computational effort when faced with finite difference techniques or special programs when using perturbation techniques, which nevertheless require the use of large matrices in their computations. In or der to simplify this task, use has been proposed of techniques that can be regarded as variants of the Response Surface Method.

This book describes the main methods used in the reliability of structures and their use in the design process leading to reliable products. This title provides the understanding needed to implement the variety of new reliability software programs.

Structural reliability theory is concerned with the rational treatment of uncertainties in struc tural engineering and with the methods for assessing the safety and serviceability of civil en gineering and other structures. It is a subject which has grown rapidly during the last decade and has evolved from being a topic for academic research to a set of well-developed or develop ing methodologies with a wide range of practical applications. Uncertainties exist in most areas of civil and structural engineeri'1.g and rational design decisions cannot be made without modelling them and taking them into account. Many structural en gineers are shielded from having to think about such problems, at least when designing simple structures, because of the prescriptive and essentially deterministic nature of most codes of practice. This is an undesirable situation. Most loads and other structural design parameters are rarely known with certainty and should be regarded as random variables or stochastic processes, even if in design calculations they are eventually treated as deterministic. Some problems such as the analysis of load combinations cannot even be formulated without recourse to probabilistic reasoning.