Probabilistic Methods in Design of Engineering Structures

Dear Colleagues,

It is widely acknowledged that the deterministic approach to the safety of buildings, machines or transport equipment has dominated in the industry until recently. Nominal (normalized) values of material properties and loads have been used for design calculations.  High values of global safety factors, simplified calculation methods, and the general state of the art contributed to the belief that it is possible and required to design structures that are absolutely safe.  Today, it is accepted that a slight risk of fault of any structure is inevitable and fundamental variables considered in the design process are uncertain to various extents. Such uncertainties result from the natural variability in mechanical properties of building materials, loads, and geometrical dimensions of structural components. Other reasons might include a lack of comprehensive information on actual characteristics of fundamental variables and methods of collecting, processing and analyzing the results of observations and experimental research. A group of uncertainties is also related to mathematical models that reflect how structures react to actions. The random nature of loads, load-carrying capacities, and calculation errors lets us draw a somewhat obvious conclusion that deterministic methods of analyzing the reliability of structures are inadequate. We must bear in mind, however, that in the engineering practice, it is important to strike a balance between, on the one hand, making calculations that are sufficiently accurate and enable the optimal and, at the same time, safe design of a structure and, on the other, using methods that are easy to adopt and provide us relatively quickly with answers, despite rough results and large safety margins.

Theories and probabilistic models that make it possible to consider such randomness in analyses are currently developed.

As processing capabilities of computers and numerical algorithms are constantly increasing and designers are becoming more interested in optimizing a structure, while keeping it adequately safe. In this same way, more sophisticated methods are being used, also in engineering practice, to take into account the randomness in calculations related to structures and to assess their reliability. A characteristic of probabilistic models is, however, their considerable complexity when it comes to estimating the probability of a structural failure and developing a model that can be used for random analysis.

Therefore, in this Special Issue, in order to establish the state of the art concerning this subject and to identify new challenges for the near future, we invite the publication of research results in each of the following fields: design of structures or their components using probabilistic methods, reliability analyses of existing objects, handling the results of experimental research using statistical processing, optimizing and modeling a structure using stochastic methods, and any developments related to considering random parameters in the design of engineering structures.

Dr. Jacek Szafran
Prof. Marcin Kamiński
Guest Editors

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