TC32 RISK ASSESSMENT AND MANAGEMENT COMMITTEE Annual Report, 2000

To: Executive Officer, Alix Lawrence, ISSMGE
From: Erik VanMarcke, Chairman, TC32 on Risk Assessment and Management
Re: Short Annual Report for the Year 2000
Date: February 19, 2001

Below is a short report on key activities of TC32 during the year 2000 and the plans for the future, intended for inclusion in the ISSMGE web site, as requested by Prof. R.N. Taylor, Secretary General of ISSMGE in his letter dated 25 January, 2001.

Committee TC32 on Risk Assessment and Management is charged with promoting and enhancing professional activities in geotechnical and geo-environmental engineering related to probabilistic site characterization, quantification of uncertainties in performance prediction, and risk-based decision analysis. The committee held a meeting on August 6, 2000 at the Conference of the Geo-Institute of ASCE in Denver, Colorado, USA, in follow-up to two meetings during 1999 (in August at Foz de Iguacu, Brasil and in December at Sydney, Australia.) Plans were finalized to conduct a short course on "Risk Assessment and Decision Making in Geotechnical Engineering" at the International SMGE Conference in Istanbul in August, 2001. This one-day course, which will be held concurrently with a short course on offshore geotechnical engineering, will consist of lectures by TC32 members A. Bolle, G. Fenton, R. Gilbert, W. Tang and E. VanMarcke. The course will introduce basic concepts of probabilistic site characterization and demonstrate how these concepts can be applied to common geotechnical design problems, spanning from the initial stages of data gathering to the final stage of design decision making. Offered as a preamble to the SMGE Conference, the short course is intended to prepare participants for many of the topics to be covered during the conference. A set of lecture notes will be prepared for distribution to participants. Plans were also discussed to present the same short course in conjunction with the Southeast Asian Geotechnical Conference in December 2001. The committee is a principal sponsor of an International Workshop on Foundation Design Codes, called IWS Kamakura 2002, to be held in April 2002 in Japan, and is active in organizing a session on (reliability-based) Load and Resistance Factor Design for Foundation Engineering. The committee's elegant website, at http://www.engmath.dal.ca/tc32/index.html, contains much additional information.