New Approach for System Reliability-Based Design Optimization

An efficient approach for reliability-based design optimization (RBDO) of series systems is presented. A modified formulation of the RBDO problem is employed in which the reliabilities of the failure modes of a system are included in the set of the design variables. This allows for an optimal apportionment of the reliability of a system among its failure modes. A sequential optimization and reliability assessment method is used to efficiently determine the optimum design. Here, the constraints on the reliabilities of the failure modes of the RBDO problem are replaced with approximate deterministic constraints. The proposed approach is demonstrated on two example problems that have been solved in previous studies without optimizing the required reliability levels of the failure modes. The first example performs RBDO to a cantilever beam with a rectangular cross section under lateral and vertical loads. The constraints are on the strength and the maximum allowable displacement. The second example performs RBDO to a cable-stayed box girder with five failure modes. Compared to the designs found by previous studies, the new approach finds designs with lower mass but without reducing the system reliability.