| One of the motivations for applying reliability-based design to geotechnical engineering is to confirm that more reasonable and cost-effective design results will be obtained when owners and designers invest in more detailed geotechnical investigations. In the present paper， we propose load and resistance factor design for the structural design of piles in grouped-pile foundations. The proposed load factor in the present study is a function of the chosen soil investigation/testing， which is applied to the bending moment in piles. Therefore， a better choice of soil investigation/testing will result in more reasonable and cost-effective design results. |
