Detrimental or serendipitous effect of human error on reliability of structures Original Research Article

This paper is directed to a single objective: to illustrate the possible error assoictated with an interpretation of experimental data, in terms of the stochastic dependency of involved random variables in view of evaluating the structural reliability. It is shown that in some circumstances the error may prove to be serendipitous; more importantly however, in some other instances it may turn out to be detrimental. It is concluded that the error associated with reliability calculations should become a part of any serious implementation of probabilistic design for structural components or large scale structures.