A Strategy for the Reliability Analysis of Complex Structural Systems

A general strategy to estimate the failure probability of the class of structural systems for which each deterministic structural analysis is expensive is proposed. The strategy is interactive, sequential and iterative. It relies upon the user to interpret and generate intelligently, through the use of appropriate techniques such as directed experimental design, sampling techniques, response surface and First- and Second-Order Reliability Methods, information about the system. The objective is to obtain increasingly accurate representations of the more important failure regions and to use these representations to arrive at an estimate of the system failure probability. The goal is to obtain an estimate with the minimum number of structural analyses.