• Computational Structural Engineering : An International Journal
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.71-80
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• 2001

A reliability approach to evaluate structural performance has gained increased acceptability and usage over the past two decades. Most reliability analyses are based on the reliability of an individual component without examining the entire structural system. These analyses often result in either unnecessary repairs or unsafe structures. This study uses examples of series, parallel, and series-parallel models of structural systems to illustrate how the component reliabilities affect the reliability of the entire system. The component-system reliability interaction can be used to develop optimum lifetime inspection and repair strategies for structural systems. These examples demonstrate that such strategies must be based on the reliability of the entire structural system. They also demonstrate that the location of an individual component in the system has a profound effect on the acceptable reliability of that component. Furthermore, when a structure is deteriorating over time, the reliability importance of various components is a1so changing with time. For this reason, the most critical component in the early life of the structure may not tie the most critical later.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
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• v.28 no.1
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• pp.74-80
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• 2013

This study describes structural reliability analysis of actively-controlled structure for which random vibration analysis is incorporated into the first-order reliability method (FORM) framework. The existing approaches perform the reliability analysis based on the RMS response, whereas the proposed study uses the peak response for the reliability analysis. Therefore, the proposed approach provides us a meaningful performance measure of the active control system, i.e., realistic failure probability. In addition, it can deal with the uncertainties in the system parameters as well as the excitations in single-loop reliability analysis, whereas the conventional random vibration analysis requires double-loop reliability analysis; one is for the system parameters and the other is for stochastic excitations. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated through a numerical example where the proposed approach shows fast and accurate reliability (or inversely failure probability) assessment results of the dynamical active control system against random seismic excitations in the presence of parametric uncertainties of the dynamical structural system.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.6 no.8
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• pp.901-919
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• 1998

Most reliability-based analyses focus on the reliability of the individual components of a structure. There are many advantages to examining the components in combination as an entire structural system. This paper illustrates an algorithm used in the computer program RELSYS (RELiability of SYStems) which computes the system reliability of any structure which can be modeled as a series-parallel combination of its components. A first-order method is used to initially compute the reliability of each individual component. The system reliability is computed by successively reducing the series and parallel systems until the system has been simplified to a single equivalent component. Equivalent alpha vectors are used to account for the correlation between failure modes during the system reduction process.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.3 no.2
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• pp.135-144
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• 1995

Since structural systems may fail in any one of several failure modes, computation of system reliability is always difficult. A method using numerical quadrature for computing structural system reliability with either one or more than one failure mode is presented in this paper. Statistically correlated safety margin equations are transformed into a group of uncorrelated variables and the joint density function of these uncorrelated variables can be generated by using the Maximum Entropy Method. Structural system reliability is then obtained by integrating the joint density function with the transformed safety domain enclosed within a set of linear equations. The Gaussian numerical integration method is introduced in order to improve computational accuracy. This method can be used to evaluate structural system reliability for Gaussian or non-Gaussian variables with either linear or nonlinear safety boundaries. It is also valid for implicit safety margins such as computer programs. Both the theory and the examples show that this method is simple in concept and easy to implement.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.4 no.6
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• pp.419-435
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• 2004

The safety level of a structural system designed per code specifications can not be inferred directly from the reliability of members due to the load redistribution and nonlinear inelastic structural behavior. Comparison of the system and member reliability, which is scarce in the literature, is likely to indicate any possible inconsistency of design codes in providing safe and economical designs. Such a comparative study is presented in this study for moment resisting two-dimensional steel frames designed per AISC LRFD Specifications. The member reliability is evaluated using the resistance of the beam-column element and the elastic load effects that indirectly accounts for the second-order effects. The system reliability analysis is evaluated based on the collapse load factor obtained from a second-order inelastic analysis. Comparison of the system and member reliability is presented for several steel frames. Results suggest that the failure probability of the system is about one order of magnitude lower than that of the most critically loaded structural member, and that the difference between the system and member reliability depends on the structural configuration, degree of redundancy, and dead to live load ratio. Results also suggest that the system reliability is less sensitive to initial imperfections of the structure than the member reliability. Therefore, the system aspect should be incorporated in future design codes in order to achieve more reliability consistent designs.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.63 no.6
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• pp.789-797
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• 2017

Recently, some integrated structural identification/damage detection and reliability evaluation of structures with uncertainties have been proposed. However, these techniques are applicable for off-line synthesis of structural identification and reliability evaluation. In this paper, based on the recursive formulation of the extended Kalman filter, an on-line integration of structural identification/damage detection and reliability evaluation of stochastic building structures is investigated. Structural limit state is expanded by the Taylor series in terms of uncertain variables to obtain the probability density function (PDF). Both structural component reliability with only one limit state function and system reliability with multi-limit state functions are studied. Then, it is extended to adopt the recent extended Kalman filter with unknown input (EKF-UI) proposed by the authors for on-line integration of structural identification/damage detection and structural reliability evaluation of stochastic building structures subject to unknown excitations. Numerical examples are used to demonstrate the proposed method. The evaluated results of structural component reliability and structural system reliability are compared with those by the Monte Carlo simulation to validate the performances of the proposed method.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.63 no.6
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• pp.799-808
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• 2017

Failure of a redundant long-span bridge is often described by innumerable failure modes, which make the structural system reliability analysis become a computationally intractable work. In this paper, an innovative procedure is proposed to efficiently identify the dominant failure modes and quantify the structural reliability for a long-span bridge system. The procedure is programmed by ANSYS and MATLAB. Considering the correlation between failure paths, a new branch and bound operation criteria is applied to the traditional stage critical strength branch and bound algorithm. Computational effort can be saved by ignoring the redundant failure paths as early as possible. The reliability of dominant failure mode is computed by FORM, since the limit state function of failure mode can be expressed by the final stage critical strength. PNET method and FORM for system are suggested to be the suitable calculation method for the bridge system reliability. By applying the procedure to a CFST arch bridge, the proposed method is demonstrated suitable to the system reliability analysis for long-span bridge structure.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
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• v.31 no.5
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• pp.95-101
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• 2016

This study proposes a multi-scale dynamic system reliability analysis of control system as a method of quantitative evaluation of its performance in probabilistic terms. In this second paper, we discuss the control effect of the viscous damper on the seismic performance of the structure-level failure. Since the failure of one structural member does not necessarily cause the collapse of the structural system, we need to consider a set of failure scenarios of the structural system and compute the sum of the failure probabilities of the failure scenarios where the statistical dependence between the failure scenarios should be taken into account. Therefore, this computation requires additional system reliability analysis. As a result, the proposed approach takes a hierarchial framework where the failure probability of a structural member is computed using a lower-scale system reliability with the union set of time-sequential member failures and their statistical dependence, and the failure probability of the structural system is again computed using a higher-scale system reliability with the member failure probabilities obtained by the lower-scale system reliability and their statistical dependence. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed approach can provide an accurate and stable reliability assessment of the control performance of the viscous damper system on the system failure. Also, the parametric study of damper capacity on the seismic performance has been performed to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed approach through the probabilistic assessment of the seismic performance improvement of the damper system.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.23 no.5
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• pp.455-468
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• 2006

Smart structural systems are defined as ones that demonstrate the ability to modify their characteristics and/or properties in order to respond favorably to unexpected severe loading conditions. The performance of such a task requires a set of additional components to be integrated within such systems. These components belong to three major categories, sensors, processors and actuators. It is wellknown that all structural systems entail some level of uncertainty, because of their extremely complex nature, lack of complete information, simplifications and modeling. Similarly, sensors, processors and actuators are expected to reflect a similar uncertain behavior. As it is imperative to be able to evaluate the impact of such components on the behavior of the system, it is as important to ensure, or at least evaluate, the reliability of such components. In this paper, a system model for reliability assessment of smart structural systems is outlined. The presented model is considered a necessary first step in the development of a reliability assessment algorithm for smart structural systems. The system model outlines the basic components of the system, in addition to, performance functions and inter-relations among individual components. A fault tree model is developed in order to aggregate the individual underlying component reliabilities into an overall system reliability measure. Identification of appropriate limit states for all underlying components are beyond the scope of this paper. However, it is the objective of this paper to set up the necessary framework for identifying such limit states. A sample model for a three-story single bay smart rigid frame, is developed in order to demonstrate the proposed framework.

• Proceedings of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute Conference
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• 1991.04a
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• pp.34-42
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• 1991

This study is directed for the development of an efficient system-level Importance Sampling Technique for system reliability analysis of bridge structures Many methods have been proposed for structural reliability assessment purposes, such as the First-order Second-Moment Method, the Advanced Second-Moment Method, Computer Simulation, etc. The Importance Sampling Technique can be employed to obtain accurate estimates of the required probability with reasonable computation effort. Based on the observation and the results of application, it nay be concluded that Importance Sampling Method is a very effective tool for the system reliability analysis.