Why is a reliability-based design framework beneficial for industry?

Dr Burt Look, OAM

Technical Committee TC304 for “Engineering Practice of Risk Assessment and Management” arranged a workshop at the recent XVIII European Conference on Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering held in Lisbon, Portugal with 5 speakers. This presentation provides a summary of that workshop on “Why is a reliability-based design framework beneficial for industry?”

The course aims to raise awareness of the benefits of using a reliability-based framework for the assessment of existing geotechnical structures and design of new structures. This is a basic course intended for people who have little or no experience of probabilistic approaches.  A few key takeaways from the Lisbon workshop will be presented and includes:

• Introduction to the concepts of probability and uncertainty. Sources of uncertainty.
• Soil parameter uncertainty. How may it be reduced?
• Dealing with uncertainty at the structure level – Factor of safety versus reliability. A deterministic model with a sensitivity check does not fully account for variability
• Illustrative examples and case histories. How can we account for different sources of uncertainty?

About the speaker

Dr Burt Look, OAM Consultant

Dr Burt Look was previously Global Practice Leader in SKM (now Jacobs), and also at Aurecon and a previous director at FSG – Geotechnics + Foundations. Burt is the 2014 Queensland Professional Engineer of the year and the Australian Geomechanics Society (AGS) Practitioner 2018. Burt was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) in 2020. Burt has published 4 geotechnical engineering books and over 100 technical publications focused on industry practice developments. He is the Australian representative of  TC304 and 1 of the five  speakers at the XVIIII ECSMGE workshop in Lisbon, Portugal.

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