ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes a redundancy factor to provide a rational reliability-based design of components in structural systems. For the representative case where the coefficients of variation of resistance and load are set to be commonly used values, the redundancy factors of N-component systems associated with different correlation cases and system models are evaluated. In most practical cases, a structure usually consists of dozens or hundreds of members; therefore, it is necessary to investigate the redundancy factors of systems with many components. For systems with many components, evaluation of all the redundancy factors with respect to different combinations of V(R) and V(P) is a computationally expensive task. The redundancy factors from the regular idealized system that doesn't consider the perfect correlation among some components can be used as a good approximation of the true redundancy factors associated with the series-parallel system to determine the designed mean resistance of girders.
