A. GENERAL REMARKS During the last century, probabilistic methods for design and analysis of engineering systems have assumed a prominent place as an engineering tool. No longer do engineers naively believe that all problems can be analyzed with deterministic methods; but rather, it has been recognized that, due to unc- tainties in the model and the excitation, it may only be possible to describe the state of a system in terms of some random measure. Thus, with the need to address safety and design issues adequately and simultaneously to minimize the cost of a system, much attention has been...