About

Structural design standards are used for the daily design of structures. They comprise of simple rules that represent the current best practice and are generally applied to regular structures. Structural design standards do not account for risk, reliability and uncertainty in an explicit manner. However, the safety concept that is implemented is taking reference to uncertainty and reliability implicitly in terms of partial safety factors and characteristic values.

In this short-course, it is demonstrated that structural design standards correspond to the societal preference for safety and cost effectiveness. A direct correspondence between reliability and the choice of partial safety factors is developed for particular cases. However, it is also shown that the set up of structural design codes is merely a problem of proper generalisation and simplification.