Genetic anti-optimization for reliability structural assessment of precast concrete structures

The paper deals with the reliability assessment of precast concrete framed structures. Due to unavoidable uncertainties, the geometrical and the mechanical properties that define the structural problem cannot be considered as deterministic quantities. In this paper, such uncertainties are modeled using a Fuzzy theory based approach. The problem is formulated in terms of safety factors: the membership function on the failure interval is searched for several given Limit States. For each level of uncertainty, the reliability problem is seen as an anti-optimization problem, where the worst unsafe solutions are achieved using genetic algorithms.