Preface

Reliability and reliability-based design have emerged over the past several decades as integral and essential concepts in structural design. Engineering design problems are known to deal with several uncertainties; from material properties to load conditions, values, and combinations. Thus, the concept of 100% safe designs does not exist in real life. Therefore, it is only realistic to express all designs in terms of the lowest acceptable probability of failure, which results in acceptable reliability for these designs. This is referred to as a reliability-based design.

Another essential concept that emerged because of the increasing demand for sustainable design and performance of all engineering systems is structural resilience. The ability of any system to recover after a major event and perform satisfactorily is another major concern. Due to climate change, the noticeable increase in the severity and frequency of environmental events affecting civil systems such as buildings, roads, highways, and infrastructure dictated structural resilience and the response to all types of disasters, natural and/or those caused by humans, as essential factors in engineering design.

Recent advances in relevant technologies have led to the emergence of innovative solutions for the design of reliable, resilient, and sustainable designs. This book introduces several innovative solutions for achieving such designs. It is organized into four sections. The first section consists of an introductory chapter that presents a range of innovative solutions that are bound to represent the avantgarde direction of travel when dealing with reliability-based design. The chapter presents the impact of innovative concepts, in general, on the resulting reliability of engineering systems. Such concepts include sustainability, smart, health monitoring, disaster response, and resilience. The second section presents a state-of-the-art approach for achieving a reliability-based design. The third section highlights several artificial intelligence applications and their impact on the reliability of integrated systems. Finally, the fourth section presents several geotechnical applications and their impact on the reliability of resulting systems.

> **Maguid Hassan** Dean of Engineering, The British University in Egypt, Cairo, Egypt

**1**

Section 1

Introduction

Section 1 Introduction
