The load and resistance factors are generally obtained by the First Order Reliability Method (FORM), in which the design point should be determined and derivative-based iterations have to be used. In this paper, a simple method for estimating the load and resistance factors using the first four moments of the basic random variables is proposed and a simple formula for the target mean resistance is proposed to avoid iteration computation. The simplicity and efficiency of the fourth moment method for determining the load and resistance factors are demonstrated from several numerical examples. Using the proposed method, the load and resistance factors can be readily determined even when the probability distributions of the basic random variables are unknown.
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