TABLE OF CONTENTS Yeou-Koung Tung
Department of Civil Engineering
Hong Kong University of Science & Technology
Clearwater Bay, Kowloon, Hong Kong
Larry W. Mays
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Arizona State University
Tempe, Arizona
Ben C. Yen
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
University of Illinois
Urbana, Illinois
A stormwater collection system is often designed with the goal to effectively collect excess surface runoffs and efficiently remove them from areas posing threat to human safety or having adverse effects on human activities. Design of stormwater collection systems is a decision-making process normally involving multiple tasks, including data analysis, hydrological modeling, hydraulic investigations, structural design, and economic studies. In each task, uncertainties of various degrees exist that prohibit designers to put their complete confidence on the satisfactory performance of the system at all times.
When facing uncertainties, the designers' general attitude is that of conservatism, which leads to the use of safety factor by either inflating load to the system and/or discounting system capacity. Conventionally, the value of safety factor is subjectively determined on the basis of individual experience and judgement. Although the use of safety factor could lead to a safer design, the conventional approach is unable to quantitatively assess the reliability of the system which allows further consideration of the tradeoff in reliability and project costs.
The intent of this chapter is to provide an overviewof some practical procedures applicable in dealing with risk and reliability analyses of stormwater collection systems. More detailed descriptions of the reliability assessment...
