Reliability in Hydraulic Design

In hydraulic design, project reliability RE is defined as the probability that a project does not fail its purpose during its design life. It depends on the probability of failure PF, which is the probability of the project to fail in any one year. In cases of high resilience (such as a reservoir not meeting its target release), PF rather than RE is needed for design. In cases of low resilience (such as the dam of a reservoir failing through overtopping), the reliability is a more useful quantity because it incorporates the change of PF (or of the hazard function, which is a related quantity) with time. The present paper is concerned with the reliability-based design of hydraulic structures.