Discussion of "Axial compression of footings in cohesionless soils. I: Load-settlement behavior" by Sami O. Akbas and Fred H. Kulhawy

The discussers would like to commend the authors for their investigation of the characterization and parameterization of the load-settlement behavior of axially loaded footings on cohesionless soils because of its importance in geotechnical practice. In this discussion, the discussers would like to: 1 provide the results of a comparative assessment of the performance of loaddisplacement models in approximating the results of a set of fullscale load tests on large footings; 2 stress the importance of investigating load-displacement uncertainty by addressing quantitatively not only second-moment statistics of model parameters but also the correlation between the parameters themselves; and 3 examine the adequateness of load-displacement models for the generation of multivariate distributions for simulation purposes.