Adaptive Monte Carlo Simulation for Time-Variant Reliability Analysis of Brittle Structures

An efficient simulation-based methodology for estimating the time-dependent reliability of a brittle structural system is presented. In the proposed method, a branch-and-bound method is used to identify the most probable failure sequence of a system. This defines the initial failure domain to start the simulation. As the simulation progresses, the initial failure domain is refined adaptively to incorporate information about the other possible dominant failure sequences, to estimate the true failure probability of the system. The simulation is continued until there is a convergence in the failure probability estimate.