ABSTRACT
Another important issue in Level 1 RBD is the choice of characteristic value. It is very conventional to choose characteristic values of load, and resistance as very high/low fractile values, such as 95%/5% based on so called Baseline Approach (e.g. Phoon et al., 2003). In order to check the effectiveness of this approach, the authors have carried out some calculations and realize that the advantage of Baseline Approach is much more obvious in determining the load factor comparing to that of resistance factor. It is recommended to take high fractile value for characteristic value of load, however the low fractile value need not to be chosen as characteristic value of resistance.
