ESTIMATION OF SYSTEM RELIABILITY BY MONTE CARLO SIMULATION

A new method for estimating the reliability of structural systems is proposed. The method is based on the use of Monte Carlo simulation. Monte Carlo based methods for system reliability analysis has several attractive features, the most important being that the system failure criterion is usually relatively easy to check almost irrespective of the complexity of the system. The disadvantage of such methods is the amount of computational efforts that may be involved. However, by reformulating the reliability problem to depend on a parameter and exploiting the regularity of the failure probability as a function of this parameter, it is shown that a substantial reduction of the computational efforts involved can be obtained.