Towards a full probabilistic design of steel portal frames

In recent years, considerable progress has been achieved in modelling realistically the structural behaviour of steel structures under ultimate limit state conditions. Additionally, recent research efforts have led to refined and sophisticated probabilistic load models for actions induced by wind and snow. The question arises if these advances can be used to develop an expert system which enables a full probabilistic design of the structure. The paper presents for the basic variables first reasonable approaches for the respective probability densities. The basic idea of the expert system is to provide for different limit states the exceedence probabilities for any combination of the basic variables and to perform the convolution of the exceedence probabilities with the probability densities of the basic variables. The latter information is provided in subroutines which can be exchanged easily.