Development of Safety in Structural Standards

Nowadays, the required safety of structures is achieved through computational verifications and qualitative requirements for the building materials and the construction processes. Both the computational verifications and the qualitative requirements are shaped by increasingly specific scientific investigations and by political framework conditions. The target values of the required safety are largely developed by models focused on individual limit states, although individual collapses have an impact on the standards. An examination of safety across the entire stock of structures has not yet been carried out. In this paper, the safety of the stock of structures is determined from the ratio of the median calculated failure probabilities of different calculations and the median observed collapse frequencies over all structures. The ratio shows the absolute safety, i.e., the sum of safety from computational verifications and qualitative requirements. This allows an assessment of the quality of research and standard-ization work.