Efficient Reliability Assessment With the Conditional Probability Method

Reliability assessment is an important procedure in engineering design in which the probability of failure or equivalently the probability of survival is computed based on appropriate design criteria and model behavior. In this paper, a new approximate and efficient reliability assessment method is proposed: the conditional probability method (CPM). Focus is set on computational efficiency and the proposed method is applied to classical load-strength structural reliability problems. The core of the approach is in the computation of the probability of failure starting from the conditional probability of failure given the load. The number of function evaluations to compute the probability of failure is a priori known to be 3n+2 in CPM, where n is the number of stochastic design variables excluding the strength. The necessary number of function evaluations for the reliability assessment, which may correspond to expensive computations, is therefore substantially lower in CPM than in the existing structural reliability methods such as the widely used first-order reliability method (FORM).