SYSTEM RELIABILITY AND REDUNDANCY IN STRUCTURAL DESIGN AND EVALUATION

Several reliability-based structural design and evaluation specifications for buildings, bridges, and offshore platforms have been proposed and implemented in North America, Asia, Australia and Europe, Thus far, however, these are largely limited to individual structural component checks and do not generally include requirements of system reliability and redundancy. The main purpose of this paper is to contribute to the development of more rational system reliability-based structural design and evaluation specifications. In this context, effects of material behavior, correlations, variabilities of resistances and loads, resistance sharing, structural damage, and number of members, on both the system reliability and redundancy of a parallel system are investigated, and a framework for including system effects in structural design and evaluation specifications is proposed.