Reliable Numerical Computation in Civil Engineering

Civil engineering is a field – as are many other engineering sciences – where most of the methods used for solving optimization problems are based on experience and experiments, and models using local information, but drawn from global models. The present work outlines an interesting class of problems from this field, and initiates some possible ways to solve those problems utilizing the wide tool capabilities of interval arithmetic for error handling and interval branch-and-bound algorithms to solve the original or modified industrial models automating civil engineers' work. The investigations are in the first state but are promising both in a theoretical and in a practical sense.