About This Course

Uncertainties are pervasive in geotechnical engineering. In the past decades, reliability methods have been developed as a powerful tool to model and quantify the effect of uncertainties in geotechnical engineering. The purpose of this course is to systematically introduce the reliability methods in the context of geotechnical engineering. There are four modules in this course, i.e., (1) analytical models for modeling uncertainties, (2) reliability methods, (3) reliability-based design, and (4) Bayesian methods for uncertainty reduction. Students can choose to learn one or more modules that they are interested in. A unique feature of this course is that the reliability methods are taught using a computation visualization technique, through which almost all the reliability methods are implemented and illustrated in Microsoft Excel. As such, the programming work involved in the reliability methods is bypassed, which will provide an efficient and transparent way to learn reliability methods effectively. Although this course is taught using examples in geotechnical engineering, the knowledge learned are also applicable to general civil engineering problems.