RELIABILITY-BASED OPTIMIZATION - A PROPOSED ANALYTICAL-EXPERIMENTAL STUDY

An analytical and experimental study for assessing the potential of re liability-based structural optimization is proposed and described, Com peting designs obtained by deterministic and reliability-based optimiz ation are compared, Tile experimental portion of the study is practica l because the structure selected is a modular, actively and passively controlled truss that consists of many identical members, and because the competing designs are compared in terms of their dynamic performan ce and are not destroyed if failure occurs, The analytical portion of tills study is illustrated on a 10-bar truss example. In the illustrat ive example, it is shown that reliability-based optimization can yield a design that is superior to an alternate design obtained by determin istic optimization. These analytical results provide motivation for th e proposed analytical-experimental study, which is described elsewhere .