A Sampling Approach to Extreme Value Distribution for Time-Dependent Reliability Analysis

Maintaining high accuracy and efficiency is a challenging issue in time-dependent reliability analysis. In this work, an accurate and efficient method is proposed for limit-state functions with the following features: The limit-state function is implicit with respect to time. There is only one stochastic process in the input to the limit-sate function. The stochastic process could be either a general strength or a general stress variable so that the limit-state function is monotonic to the stochastic process. The new method employs a sampling approach to estimate the distributions of the extreme value of the stochastic process. The extreme value is then used to replace the corresponding stochastic process. Consequently the time-dependent reliability analysis is converted into its time-invariant counterpart. The commonly used time-invariant reliability method, the first order reliability method, is then applied to calculate the probability of failure over a given period of time. The results show that the proposed method significantly improves the accuracy and efficiency of time-dependent reliability analysis.