Residual Risks and Acceptance Criteria for Accidental Loading on Infrastructural Facilities

The consistent assessment of accidental loads on structures is difficult in practice because for many of these loads the recent standards do not include standardized design procedures. Accidental loads include all natural hazards as well as all man-made hazards. This project aims at establishing the foundations to enable the use of risk analyses on a consistent basis and at developing a generic procedure which can be applied to the different types of infrastructural facilities on highways. The research project is thematically divided in two parts. The first part deals with a description of a methodology of risk-analysis due to accidental loads. On the basis of example applications, the methodology will be developed for different facility classes and different loads and a generic procedure will be identified. A methodology for probabilistically modelling accidental loads will be developed, and the consequences will be taken into account in a quantitative manner. In the second part, based on decision theory, the foundations will be developed that allow the identification of the acceptable level of risk for the individual facilities in a generic manner.

• Residual Risks and Acceptance Criteria for Accidental Loading on Infrastructural Facilities (ETH Research Database 12392)