An Efficient Time-Variant Reliability Analysis Method with Mixed Uncertainties

Abstract

In practical engineering, due to the lack of information, it is impossible to accurately determine the distribution of all variables. Therefore, time-variant reliability problems with both random and interval variables may be encountered. However, this kind of problem usually involves a complex multilevel nested optimization problem, which leads to a substantial computational burden, and it is difficult to meet the requirements of complex engineering problem analysis. This study proposes a decoupling strategy to efficiently analyze the time-variant reliability based on the mixed uncertainty model. The interval variables are treated with independent random variables that are uniformly distributed in their respective intervals. Then the time-variant reliability-equivalent model, containing only random variables, is established, to avoid multi-layer nesting optimization. The stochastic process is first discretized to obtain several static limit state functions at different times. The time-variant reliability problem is changed into the conventional time-invariant system reliability problem. First order reliability analysis method (FORM) is used to analyze the reliability of each time. Thus, an efficient and robust convergence hybrid time-variant reliability calculation algorithm is proposed based on the equivalent model. Finally, numerical examples shows the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Keywords

• interval variables
• random variables
• time-variant reliability analysis
• hybrid uncertain model