Structural Engineering is never black and white. It is riddled, on multiple levels, with uncertainty.
But how can this be? When I make a structural model in a software package and analyse it, the outcome is there. It has used formulas to determine the outcome. It cannot be wrong.
Structural Modelling is Deterministic.
Structural modelling does not give us a range of possible outcomes, it does not represent the uncertainty embedded in the design, it is not random or probabilistic.
Because the answer is black and white, one might think that this is the answer. But that is far from the truth.
Limit States Design is a stochastic system that is well researched, well understood, and accepted internationally. It deals with uncertainties in materials and loads. But this is not the only uncertainty that exists. There are other uncertainties that are not stochastic around judgement, knowledge, understanding, human error, heuristics and noise.
We are challenging our team to experiment with a ranking scale to measure the level of uncertainty in their solutions on a percentage scale. 0% means certain to fail, 100% means identically matches the ideal (an impossible proposition, even in a laboratory), 50% means a small chance of failure. 50%-85% is the typical range we are looking for.
