Reliability level III method in design of square pillar resting on weak floor stratum

Summary Current methods of design of pillars resting on weak floor strata involve only a deterministic, conventional safety factor calculation, based on material parameters treated as the mean values taken from observations. In a case where high parameters variability occurs, these methods may lead to fatal design errors resulting in excessive pillar settlement and roof falls. Therefore, to include the influence of parameters quality, the new approach based on reliability level III method was developed. Consideration was given to the identification of the system parameters importance, and to density function for the safety factor treated as a random variable. Design procedure involving floor probability of failure was illustrated by numerical examples.