A Consistent Failure Model for Probabilistic Analysis of Shallow Foundations

In today's codes of practice, e. g. Eurocode 7 different ultimate limit states are distin- guished. To overcome these problems an alternative design approach has been established on the basis of a unique failure condition. This failure condition describes the ultimate limit state of shallow foundations over the whole loading range without distinguishing different failure modes. The failure condition spreads out a failure surface which represents the outer border of the permissible loading. Hence the dis- tance of the actual loading from the failure surface describes the safety of the system. This safety can be determined easily using reliability analysis. Here, the Hasofer-Lind second moment reliability index sHL will be evaluated. The reliability based design of the foundation for a vertical breakwater based on this model is presented. The influences of individual load combinations on the safety of the system taking into account scatter and correlations of the parameters are examined.