N° 147. 1982. Conceptional Preparation of Future Codes - Progress Report

The improvement of regulatory documents will lead to important economic and technical benefits. These benefits may result from work along different lines , such as , clarification of basic concepts, covering of new codification fields , implementation of recent technical knowledge . 

The interest of CEB in carrying out activities along these lines is thus fully justified . · This Bulletin d' Information presents same recent studies in three main areas of the above mentioned domains. 

First comments are given to the actual state of knowledge in the field of quality assurance and reliability of concrete structures , and suggestions are made which rnay help to speed up and implement the progress in this field. 

Secondly considerations resulting from the work of the CEB-Task Group: "Perfomance Criteria for Concrete Structures" are presented which propose a rational concept for a presentation of regulatory documents based on perfomance. 

Finally four contributions present the state-of-the-art in the field of the reliability assessment of structures explaining in particular the background, the practical application of level-II methods, and giving same critical considerations concerning the application of a partial coefficient format to different types of limit state equation and a survey of the various existing load combination formulae . 

Further studies directed towards conceptional improvement of regulatory documents will follow . These studies are under way not only within the CEB but also as a result of a close cooperation with the ACI . The aim of these studies consists in preparing a new generation of regulatory documents , based on sound concepts , presented in a rational way, and which will allow better to solve the wide variety of structural problems , not hindering progress but , on the contrary, stimulating innovation . 

Lisbon, January 1982