Discussion on: moment methods for structural reliability ☆

A few comments on moment method for reliability analysis advocated by Zhao and Ono are presented in the paper. It is demonstrated using a number of numerical examples that the first four moments of a distribution, particularly when they are crudely estimated, do not always allow good estimates of tail probabilities, and that some different equivalent forms of performance function that describe the same structural problem may give totally incorrect values for the reliability when the Zhao and Ono methodology is applied to them. Furthermore, the computation method for the first four moments proposed by the same authors may be incorrect so that the reliability result is unreasonable accordingly.