About

This course aims at the procurement of basic knowledge in the topics of uncertainty representation, risk and safety and makes students develop a new mind-set expendable for interpreting all kinds of engineering problems.

The course will develop basic knowledge, understanding and practical skills. The course content is organized in different thematic main blocks:

• Optimization and Acceptance. Evaluation of fundamental risk based performance criteria. An objective function for engineering structures is developed. It is discussed how human safety can be incorporated. It is seen that the structural failure probability is of particular interest.

• Methods for structural reliability assessment. Different methods for the estimation of the structural failure probability are introduced. The methods facilitate a realistic representation of structural engineering problems, however, we will learn that a proper engineering uncertainty representation is necessary.

• Basic engineering uncertainty modelling. It is demonstrated how uncertainties can be represented for different relevant phenomena. Practical methods are introduced to represent material resistance and time varying loads.

• Standards and code calibration. The methodical basis of structural codes is introduced and the general background of the overall safety concept is examined.