Structurae

The Future of Safety Concepts in Structural Engineering.
In the beginning the paper discusses the legal safety requirements for design and construction of civil engineering structures and the observed risks from structural failures. The paper is continued by a short description of the history of safety concepts in structural engineering. This section is finished by some details of the current semi-probabilistic safety concept. Furthermore the assumptions about uncertainty in the numerical safety concept are compared with observed causes of structural failures and damages. It can be seen, that human failures contribute significantly to the catastrophic collapses of structures. However, currently they are excluded in the design codes of practice. This result is also valid for software failures. The integration of human failures and software failures in the probabilistic safety concept yields to major problems since human failures and software failures are not random. Therefore an extension of the probabilistic safety concept with advanced mathematical techniques to deal with uncertainty is currently under way. However, the legal consequences of this extension are not yet investigated.