Engineers traditionally base their designs on past experience; this is particularly true in the building and construction industry. In recent decades, however, as the design is increasingly required for systems in environments where there is very little experience to rely on, e.g. nuclear structures, offshore platforms, and space stations, the uncertainty that the engineer faces becomes an important issue and requires serious study. As the uncertainty in the structural loading in general plays a dominant role, in the last decade there has been a rapid increase in the study of the modeling and risk evaluation of loadings on structural systems, in particular, the problem of risk under multiple loads over the structure's lifetime. Methodologies based on probability and statistics theories have been developed to quantify the uncertainty and, as a result, engineers are now better equipped to face the challenge of design under uncertainty. This book provides an account of the development thus far in this area and can be understood by readers with only a basic background in probability and statistics.
