Influence of geometrical imperfections and residual stresses on the reliability of high strength steel welded I-section columns using Monte Carlo simulation

This paper aims to assess the influence of geometrical imperfections and residual stresses on the reliability of the stability design rules for steel columns in Eurocode 3 considering a full probabilistic approach and further validate the new buckling curves in the scope of the ongoing revision of the Structural Eurocodes. A reliability...

Estimating the effect of assumed initial damage to the hydraulic stability of pattern-placed revetments on dikes using finite element modeling

Initial damage, caused by previous wave loading or other events, might affect the hydraulic stability of pattern-placed revetments. Three common types of damage are considered in this study. The effect of this assumed initial damage on the hydraulic stability and failure probability of revetments is quantified using a FEM model. This model is...

Schematizing Rainfall Events with Multivariate Depth-Duration Dependence

Accurately modelling rainfall events is crucial for flood risk assessment and stormwater infrastructure design. However, transforming statistical characteristics of events into relevant rainfall patterns is challenging due to the natural variability of rainfall. Two commonly used methods to schematize rainfall events have limitations: the nested...

Fatigue reliability of wind turbines: historical perspectives, recent developments and future prospects

Wind, as a sustainable and affordable energy source, represents a strong alternative to traditional energy sources. However, wind power is only one of the options, together with other renewable energy sources. Consequently, the core concerns for wind turbine manufacturers and operators are to increase its reliability and decrease costs,...

Expert judgment-based reliability analysis of the Dutch flood defense system

The Wettelijk Beoordelingsinstrumentarium (WBI) is the legal set of instruments for flood risk analysis in the Netherlands. Often, engineers have the impression that some failure probabilities of flood defenses resulting from these instruments are overestimated. In an effort to better estimate the failure probabilities of dikes along the...

Bayesian estimation for reliability engineering: Addressing the influence of prior choice

Over the last few decades, reliability analysis has attracted significant interest due to its importance in risk and asset integrity management. Meanwhile, Bayesian inference has proven its advantages over other statistical tools, such as maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) and least square estimation (LSE), in estimating the parameters...

Sensitivity method for extreme-based engineering problems

Engineering models are becoming increasingly complex, involving a larger number of variables. As a result, engineers struggle to deeply understand the models and therefore validate and properly use them. Sensitivity analyses (SA) are usually conducted to help with this task. Nonetheless, the knowledge and computational efforts required to...

Evaluating residual dyke resistance using the Random Material Point Method

Due to a lack of large deformation dyke assessment models, primary failure mechanisms, such as inner slope failure, are often used as a proxy to assess the probability of failure of a dyke. However, a dyke continues to fulfil its main function unless, or until, flooding occurs. The Random Material Point Method (RMPM) is used here to investigate...

Adaptive approaches in metamodel-based reliability analysis: A review

The present work reviews the implementation of adaptive metamodeling for reliability analysis with emphasis in four main types of metamodels: response surfaces, polynomial chaos expansions, support vector machines, and Kriging models. The discussion presented is motivated by the identified spread and little interaction between metamodeling...

Improving dike reliability estimates by incorporating construction survival

During construction of a dike, slope stability often reaches critical levels, due to the excess pore water pressures in the foundation. The loading condition during construction has similarities with the design conditions during flood loading. Not only in terms of the pore water pressures as the main driving force, but also in terms of...

From iteration to system failure: Characterizing the fitness of periodic weakly-hard systems

Estimating metrics such as the Mean Time To Failure (MTTF) or its inverse, the Failures-In-Time (FIT), is a central problem in reliability estimation of safety-critical systems. To this end, prior work in the real-time and embedded systems community has focused on bounding the probability of failures in a single iteration of the control loop,...

An extended probabilistic method for reliability analysis under mixed aleatory and epistemic uncertainties with flexible intervals

The reliability analysis approach based on combined probability and evidence theory is studied in this paper to address the reliability analysis problem involving both aleatory uncertainties and epistemic uncertainties with flexible intervals (the interval bounds are either fixed or variable as functions of other independent variables). In...

Reliability-based analysis of river dikes during flood waves

Reliability and risk analyses are basic approaches, nowadays, for flood risk assessments in European countries such as the Netherlands, German, United Kingdom, etc. The methods also receive a lot of interest in developing countries. By considering uncertainties for both load and strength variables, the probability of failure for each element of...

Approximate confidence regions for the parameters of three software reliability models

Expressions are derived from which confidence regions for the parameters of three specific software reliability models can be computed. These expressions are based on the asymptotic probability distribution of the maximum likelihood estimator. Some numerical results of point estimates as well as confidence regions are given, based on simulated...