A new reliability analysis method for uncertain structures with random and interval variables

In this paper, a new reliability analysis method is developed for uncertain structures with mixed uncertainty. In our problem, the uncertain parameters with sufficient information are treated by random distributions, while some ones with limited information can only be given variation intervals. A complex nesting optimization will be involved when using the existing methods to compute such a hybrid reliability, which will lead to extremely low efficiency or instable convergence performance. In this paper, an equivalent model is firstly created for the hybrid reliability, which is a conventional reliability analysis problem with only random variables. Thus only through computing the reliability of the equivalent model the original hybrid reliability can be easily evaluated. Based on the above equivalent model, an algorithm with high efficiency and robust convergence performance is then constructed for computation of the above hybrid reliability with both random and interval variables. Two numerical examples are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the present method.