Demonstrating adequate safety for exceptional designs and new design applications requires an explicit evaluation of the safety level, considering the uncertainties associated with the design. The recently published PD 7974-7:2019 provides five routes to demonstrating adequate safety through probabilistic methods but does not include worked examples. The case study in this paper presents three state-of-the-art approaches for demonstrating achievement of an absolute safety target (acceptance concept ‘AC3’ in PD 7974-7:2019) for a concrete column in an office building with stringent reliability requirements. The case study shows how fragility curves listed by, for example, industry organizations can support probabilistic approaches and a more comprehensive understanding of design performance
