Abstract
The design of reinforced concrete structures requires a few criteria to be fulfilled, especially in Limit States Theory adopted by many international standards in structural design. Two key criteria are ultimate limit state and serviceability limit state. Both of these limit states have one common aspect which governs the whole concept of design especially in reinforced concrete design, which is the ductility requirement. The purpose of satisfying the ductility requirement is to ensure safety of users and occupants of the designed structure. In this paper, the ductility requirement is explained in the adoption of the Eurocode EC2 in place of BS8110. In order to have a smooth transition from BS8110 to EC2, the author would also like to introduce a unified approach for the analysis and design of concrete members in flexure by utilizing a unifying parameter q (combined reinforcing index). This would allow a design engineer to analyze and to design for normally reinforced, partially prestressed, and even fully prestressed concrete and composite sections. Through this approach, it is hoped that the Malaysian practicing structural engineers can make a smooth switchover to the use of Eurocode EC2 for reinforced concrete design.