Reliability-based design for the structure of tower crane under aleatory and epistemic uncertainties

In this paper, a reliability-based design method for the structure of tower crane by accounting for the randomness of design variables and fuzziness of the design criteria is proposed. The number of design variables affects the computational efficiency seriously, hence sensitivity analysis is implemented to select the sensitive variables as the design variables to decrease the number of design variables. The limit state function is constructed by combining the finite element analysis (FEA) and response surface method (RSM). The fuzzy reliability analysis is transformed to crisp reliability analysis with the eigenfunction. The design results show that the proposed method could be more consistent with the engineering practices.