Human error in steel beam design

Abstract

Abstract It is apparent that the presence of human error in structural design leads, in most cases, to a loss of structural safety. Thus it is of interest to examine the effects of human error on a typical design task. The design task considered in this paper in the design of a flexural member for varying combinations of dead and live loads, and of spans. The development and analysis of a mathematical model to describe the process of the design of a flexural member is outlined in the present paper. The model was used to derive a series of resistance distributions, these together with accepted existing loading models were used for the computation of structural reliability. The computed values of structural reliability (“safety index”) indicates that the presence of human error in design causes a non-uniform reduction of the safety index. It is observed that the effect of human error is more severe as the size of the expected member size increases. However, this effect may be reversed when the expected memb...