Potential Use of AS 5104 for Reliability-Based Design

According to Sect. 4.1 of the Australian Standard AS 5104, structures and their components must be planned, built and upheld to meet their intended purpose throughout their design lifespan, while also being economically viable. Additionally, the standard emphasises assessing reliability based on potential failure consequences, as well as the costs, efforts and procedures required to mitigate such failure risks. In theory, an engineer could brief an asset owner, and hence adopt a risk profile to suit their needs and be compliant with Australian Standards and the National Construction Code. An example of using reliability-based methods to assess the slope of landfill liners and an example of assessing the probability of failure for solar farm foundations is presented. A key barrier to the adoption of reliability-based methods is an estimation of probability density functions for all of the relevant parameters when data is limited. The use of Bayesian methods to derive parameters for the landfill liner is discussed.