Unfavorable design combinations of forces are selected in SCAD on the basis of the superposition principle. In order to limit the number of design combinations of forces (DCF) to be taken into consideration, a particular approach is used for every type of the stress state. Out of 2n combinations (where n is the number of loadings), only those DCF are selected that correspond to the maximum value of a certain quantity which is assigned to be a criterion and depends on all components of the stress state.