ABSTRACT
Design in structural engineering relies to a great extent on the concept of characteristic values, which serve as safe measures for variable parameters and effects. This approach rests on the requirement for sufficiently small (or large) exceedance probability, with respect to the effect of concern, while ignoring the impact of unwanted cases. However, uncertainty in a structural system is often associated with the relative magnitude of failure loads, besides the relative failure frequency. For these cases, in the present paper, we propose a shift from quantile-based characteristic values of random effects, to tail expectation ones. We discuss the scope of the developed concept on a theoretical level while providing implications for its usefulness in engineering practice.
