Redundancy Measures for Design and Evaluation of Structural Systems

Abstract
Despite the fact that the need for structural redundancy has already been recognized by several standard specifications, no criteria to quantify redundancy in design and evaluation of structural systems are explicitly given within these specifications. The purpose of this paper is to discuss both deterministic and probabilistic measures for design and evaluation of structural systems. A comparison of some of the proposed redundancy measures is presented via numerical examples and observations pertaining to the ranges of their applicability are made.