Efficient Assessment of Structural Reliability in Presence of Random and Fuzzy Uncertainties

This paper presents an efficient uncertainty analysis for estimating the possibility distribution of structural reliability in presence of mixed uncertain variables. The proposed method involves high dimensional model representation for the limit state function approximation, transformation technique to obtain the contribution of the fuzzy variables to the convolution integral and fast Fourier transform for solving the convolution integral. In this methodology, efforts are required in evaluating conditional responses at a selected input determined by sample points, as compared to full scale simulation methods, thus the computational efficiency is accomplished. The proposed method is applicable for structural reliability estimation involving any number of fuzzy and random variables with any kind of distribution.