The safety, durability and robustness of concrete structures largely depends on the ability to accurately predict their (time-dependent) structural response for which the development of appropriate modelling techniques is of paramount importance. However, in concrete discontinuity regions such as deep beams, half joints, corbels, nodes, etc., the strain distribution is significantly non-linear. Hence, for design and assessment typically limit analysis approaches such as strut-and-tie models, stress fields and kinematic models are employed. These design and assessment approaches however lead to a conservative (and hence sometimes uneconomical) design and are moreover strongly deterministic. There is limited information available on how to appropriately consider uncertainties in these methods both for new structures as well as when considering degradation in case of existing structures. Furthermore, it is not clear how these uncertainties affect the structural behaviour of discontinuity regions. Therefore, a probabilistically-based weighting of possible strut-and-tie or kinematic models under uncertainty is needed and a reliability-based calculation framework needs to be developed. Consecutively, a simplified reliability-based partial factor format can be derived for these structural topologies. Finally, this approach will be validated by experimental and numerical investigations in relation to two common structural topologies.