Reliability‐Conditioned Partial Safety Factors

Abstract

The first‐order second‐moment (FOSM) method and the advanced second‐moment (ASM) method are used to determine partial safety factors. Design formats based on these methods may result in engineering designs with reliability levels that are different from the ones specified in developing the design formats. The FOSM and ASM methods are evaluated in this paper, and reliability‐conditioned (RC) method is proposed in this paper. The proposed method overcomes the shortcomings of the FOSM and ASM methods, and is believed to result in partial safety factors which give engineering designs reliability levels equal to the specified ones. The calibration of existing codes can be accomplished easily by determining the safety levels of the current designs first and then the required partial safety factors for the new design format to give the same safety levels can be determined.