Large structural systems reliability

A methodology of progressive failure imposition and reanalysis is presented for the reliability evaluation of large elasto-plastic structures. Typically, such analysis involves prohibitive computational effort in the presence of nonlinear behavior. The authors use the correlations between individual component failures and formulate a computational strategy that closely monitors such effects on element reliability. The same correlations are also used to speed up the identification of significant failure modes during the estimation of the overall system reliability of the structure