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 August 2024 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?”

A few key takeaways from the Lisbon workshop will be presented and include:

• 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 local case histories. How can we account for different sources of uncertainty?

Most Geotechnical Engineers avoid probabilistic methods and prefer their judgement. Opinions based on judgement do vary. This introduction is intended for engineers who have little or no experience of reliability-based approaches, which are now becoming common in Eurocodes.

Dr Burt Look, OAM Consultant

Burt Look was previously Global Practice Leader at SKM (now Jacobs) and 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 one of the five speakers at the XVIIII ECSMGE workshop in Lisbon, Portugal.

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