Case Study of Offshore Pile System Reliability

This paper presents the results of research effort to evaluate the reliability of offshore pile foundation systems. It is an extension of previous work by the authors [14] dealing with the reliability of individual piles under axial and lateral loading. The reliability of the pile system is evaluated for three case study platform designs, and the level of reserve between initial failure of an individual pile within the system and system collapse is studied. The results of this research are valuable in providing insight into the reliability achieved with current design procedures and the factors which affect the performance of the foundation system. The results should facilitate the development of reliability based design procedures which provide for a consistent level of safety between different site conditions, loading conditions and pile configurations.