A great deal of effort has been directed toward developing reliability based procedures for use in the design of offshore platforms. The emphasis in this study was on the use of design contours and the treatment of uncertainties associated with modeling the environment and variation of structural parameters. A combination of a empirically based environmental model and a numerically based Monte Carlo simulation was used to establish the probabilities of failure conditional on occurrence of particular storms. An example is presented which illustrates the effects of top tension variation in a TLP designed to be deployed in a 750m water depth. A discussion relating the conditional probabilities of failure, the reliability index, and the return periods has been included.

Keywords:
contour, simulation, behavior, civil engineering, constraint, tendon, tendon model, department, construction, variation
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Copyright 1995, The Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers
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