| Summary: | The principal mission of structural design consists in the development of economical though reliable structures. Any safety-related improvements boost the cost of a structure, while any reduction of costs involves higher risks. The objective of any structural designer is to pinpoint the optimal structural parameters among the whole variety of solutions that fall within the range of the pre-set design requirements and minimal risks. Selection of the optimality criteria applicable to reinforced concrete structures is to be based on a set of requirements, including low costs, technological efficiency, safety and observance of limits imposed onto the expenditure of material resources and the workforce.
The author suggests splitting the aforementioned parameters into the two groups, namely, natural parameters and value-related parameters that are introduced to assess the costs of development, transportation, construction and operation of a structure, as well as the costs of its potential failure. The author proposes a new improved methodology for the identification of the above parameters that ensures optimal solutions to non-linear objective functions accompanied by non-linear restrictions that are critical to the design of reinforced concrete structures. Any structural failure may be interpreted as the bounce of a random process associated with the surplus bearing capacity into the negative domain. Monte Carlo numerical methods make it possible to assess these bounces into the unacc eptable domain.
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