Philosophy of Structural Building Codes

摘要

Structural building codes serve a number of purposes, but the primary one is to provide minimum standards of design that protect human health and safety. Codes have grown more complicated over the past 25 years primarily by providing increasing numbers of explicit provisions for the design of most structural members. Explicit provisions appear to be a good way to encode design knowledge, but too many of them will make the code difficult to decode. Encoding and decoding of design knowledge is best performed by a combination of implicit and explicit provisions providing general design principles and optimizing the number of explicit provisions in order to minimize the noise in the encoding/decoding process.