Title: Structural analysis with probability-boxes

Authors: Hao Zhang; Robert L. Mullen; Rafi L. Muhanna

Addresses: School of Civil Engineering, University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia. ' Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208, USA. ' School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Savannah, GA 31407, USA

Abstract: Probability-box (p-box) is a rigorous and practical way to represent epistemic sources of uncertainty where the available knowledge is insufficient to construct the required probability distributions. In this paper, interval finite element (FE) methods are combined with the concept of p-box to analyse structures subjected to uncertain loads modelled by p-boxes. Two methods, namely the discrete p-box convolution and interval Monte Carlo methods, are presented along with example problems. The computational efficiency of the p-box FE method is also presented.

Keywords: epistemic uncertainty; imprecise probability; interval analysis; interval FEM; finite element method; Monte Carlo simulation; probability boxes; random sets; structural reliability.

DOI: 10.1504/IJRS.2012.044292

International Journal of Reliability and Safety, 2012 Vol.6 No.1/2/3, pp.110 - 129

Received: 30 Jul 2010
Accepted: 28 Mar 2011
Published online: 27 Dec 2014 *

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