Modelling Under Risk and Uncertainty: An Introduction to Statistical, Phenomenological and Computational Methods

1.2 Engineering Design, Safety and Structural Reliability Analysis (SRA)

This section concentrates on the issues associated with risks incurred by industrial facilities as the result of internal initiating failures or adverse events. In contrast, the preceding section involved natural initiators, hence external aggressions. The division between the two domains is very much a matter of tradition, and later chapters will offer generic approaches that show a common theoretical foundation. Practices in industrial safety have nevertheless led to greater use and development of probabilistic risk assessment methods, such as structural reliability analysis (as reviewed below) or systems reliability (see Section 1.3).

1.2.1 The Domain of Structural Reliability

Design of industrial structures, be they nuclear, aerospace, offshore, transport, and so on, has generated the need for some rules or codes to prevent failure mechanisms and secure reliability levels in the face of highly diverse sources of uncertainty affecting the operating systems (variability of material properties, of operational loads, fabrication tolerances, . . .). Beyond empirical design margins, a whole range of methods is usually referred to as the structural reliability analysis (SRA) (Madsen, Kenk, and Lind, 1986). This domain is not disconnected from the previous considerations regarding protection against natural risk: in fact, much emerged from the design issues related to external events such as offshore sea waves ...