ADAPTIVE MONTE-CARLO SIMULATION FOR TIME-VARIANT RELIABILITY-ANALYSISOF BRITTLE STRUCTURES

An efficient simulation-based methodology for estimating the time-depe ndent reliability of a brittle structural system is presented. In the proposed method, a branch-and bound method is used to identify the mos t probable failure sequence of a system. This defines the initial fail ure domain to start the simulation. As the simulation progresses, the initial failure domain is refined adaptively to incorporate informatio n about the other possible dominant failure sequences, to estimate the true failure probability of the system. The simulation is continued u ntil there is a convergence in the failure probability estimate.