While environmental life cycle assessment is an established method for predicting environmental impacts over the lifetime of a structure or building, and is supported by ISO-norms, it overlooks social impacts such as structural safety. The more comprehensive life cycle sustainability
assessment, which also includes economic and societal sustainability, is not as mature. There is especially a lack of quantitative indicators for the societal impacts of a structure, which form part of social life cycle assessment.

This paper investigates the use of an existing societal indicator, the Life Quality Index, which has not been used in social life cycle assessment before. It has, however, been used previously in structural engineering applications to establish societally acceptable and economically optimal failure probabilities of structures. In this paper, this use is compared to the most recent guidelines on social life cycle assessment by the United Nations Environmental Programme.

This paper proposes that the current use of the life quality index can be part of the social impact assessment phase of social life cycle assessment. It then forms part of a social mechanism within an impact pathway approach, one of the two approaches towards social impact assessment proposed by the guidelines. This is demonstrated using an example based on the design of a simple structure, following the four phases of a life cycle assessment. The demonstrated approach is able to combine societal and economic considerations, making it a promising candidate for future applications in life cycle sustainability assessment of structures.

In this paper, a novel method is developed for determining the reliability of a complex structure under dynamic crowd loading, combining a Finite Element model of a structure and a frequency-domain load model in a reliability analysis. The method is applied on a representative case of a grandstand under dynamic crowd loading. Excited crowds jumping up and down on a grandstand can cause noticeable vibrations, which negatively affect the serviceability of the structure due to discomfort. The FE model consists of linear beam elements, with a distributed dynamic load along the seating deck, described in the frequency domain. The amplitude spectrum of this load is parameterized using a number of stochastic parameters, of which the distribution is determined by sampling a dataset of experimentally measured crowd loads. With this load model, the amplitude spectrum of the acceleration response of the grandstand is determined, from which a serviceability criterion based on acceleration intensity is evaluated. Through a Monte Carlo analysis, an exceedance probability Pf of 0.3264 is calculated, with a coefficient of variation of 0.025. A more advanced reliability calculation method, DARS, was also applied, resulting in a value of Pf between 0.400 and 0.444.