38 Offshore Structural Engineering

exceeded in any one year is 0.01 (=1/100). But as a designer, one may not be inter-
ested in the reoccurrence of any event with its extreme value. Rather, the interest is
about the fact that what is the probability that the design load will be exceeded dur-
ing the life of the structure? Since (1/R) is the probability that the characteristic load
will be exceeded in 1 year (1–1/R) will be that it will not exceed in any one year. For
the structure whose life is denoted as “n, probability that the extreme event will not
be exceeded during those “n years” is the designer’s interest; this is given as (1–1/R)n.
Hence, the probability of characteristics load to be exceeded, at least once in lifetime
of the structure is given by
n
 1
pn = 1 − 1 −  (1.158)
 R

For example, if the return period is 50 years of any characteristic load and the
life time of the structure is 20 years (which is common in offshore structures as the
oil reserve for exploration is not consistent beyond a maximum period of 20 years),
then probability that the design load is exceeded at least once during the 20 years is
given by
20
 1 
p20 = 1 − 1 −  = 0.33 (1.159)
 50 

It is clear from the above example that there is a chance of the design load exceed-
ing its characteristic value at least by 33% at least once within the lifetime of the
structure. As a designer, this is quite important as this percentage is significantly
high for a reasonable estimate of the cited example. Therefore, safety factors are
used in the design to take care of such uncertainties (Marshall, 1976; Pasman et al.,
2009; Srinivasan Chandarsekaran, 2015c).

1.20 ESTIMATE OF DISTRIBUTION PARAMETERS

Probability distributions are a vital part of statistics. A few of the practical appli-
cations are: (i) to compute the confidence intervals for parameters and (ii) to cal-
culate critical regions for hypothesis tests. For univariate data, it is often useful to
determine a reasonable distributional model for the data. Statistical intervals and
hypothesis tests are often based on specific assumptions of the type of distribu-
tion that follows. Before computing an interval or test based on this assumption,
one needs to verify the justification of this assumption for the given data set.
This does not mean that the distribution needs to be the best-fitting distribution
for the given data, but adequate-enough models should be assumed so that the
statistical technique yields valid conclusions. It is therefore important to use the
simulation studies with random numbers that are generated using a specific prob-
ability distribution. There are various methods, both numerical and graphical,
for estimating the parameters of a probability distribution; important ones are
discussed below: