ABSTRACT
Structural codes and standards provide the foundation of good engineering practice and a framework for addressing safety and serviceability issues in structural design. This chapter describes the National Bureau of Standards’s Development of a Probability-based Load Criterion for American National Standard A58, relating the context in which the publication appeared, its impact on science, technology, and the general public, and brief details about the lives and work of the author. In 1978, Ellingwood accepted the challenge of leading the development of a set of common probability-based load requirements for limit states design that would be compatible with all common construction technologies. In probability-based limit states design, the structural reliability formulation is presented in such a way as to make it practical for design by engineers who may not be familiar with reliability concepts or have access to the necessary statistical data.
