Structural Reliability Modeling Based on Imprecise Probability Theory under Insufficient Data

Traditional structural reliability analysis methods adopt precise probabilities to quantify uncertainties and they are suitable for systems with sufficient statistical data.However,the problem of insufficient data is often encountered in practical engineering.Thus,structural reliability analysis methods under insufficient data have caught more and more attentions in recent years and a lot of nonprobabilistic reliability analysis methods are put forward to deal with the problem of insufficient data.Non-probabilistic structural reliability analysis methods based on fuzzy set,Dempster-Shafer theory,interval analysis and other theories have got a lot of achievements both in theoretical and practical aspects and they have been successfully applied in structural reliability analysis of largescale complex systems with small samples and few statistical data.In addition to non-probabilistic structural reliability analysis methods,structural reliability analysis based on imprecise probability theory is a new method proposed in recent years.Study on structural reliability analysis using imprecise probability theory is still at the start stage,thus the generalization of imprecise structural reliability model is very important.In this paper,the imprecise probability was developed as an effective way to handle uncertainties,the detailed procedures of imprecise structural reliability analysis was introduced,and several specific imprecise structural reliability models which are most effective for engineering systems were given.At last,an engineering example of a cantilever beam was given to illustrate the effectiveness of the method emphasized here.By comparing with interval structural reliability analysis,the result obtained from imprecise structural reliability model is a little conservative than the one resulted from interval structural reliability analysis for imprecise structural reliability analysis model considers that the probability of each value is taken from an interval.