1. Introduction

This part treats the general principles for a probabilistic design of load bearing structures. The more detailed aspects dealing with the probabilistic description of loads are treated in part 2. In the same way the probabilistic description of structural resistance parameters is treated in part 3.

This part doesn’t give detailed information about methods for the calculation of probabilities. It is assumed that the user of a probabilistic code is familiar with such methods. A clause on the interpretation of probabilities treated in this document is provided in Annex D.