Bounding Uncertainty in Civil Engineering: Theoretical Background and Applications

The design of civil engineering constructions frequently involves a great uncertainty about loading conditions, material properties and their degradation in time, human errors in modeling, construction and successive management. These uncertainties seldom can be described by mapping probabilistic input variables through a deterministic model, to obtain the precise expectation of output parameters. In the last years researchers referred to the more general idea of imprecise probabilities to derive lower/upper bounds of output expectations. In this field, the theory of random sets appears as the most appropriate and relatively simple approach for many typical engineering problems, containing probabilistic methods, interval analyses and fuzzy sets as particular cases. The theoretical background and its connection to the more general theory of imprecise probabilities are briefly summarized. Finally the results of real world field applications of the theory to large scale urban building constructions in order to evaluate their seismic vulnerability are presented

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