A METHOD FOR STRUCTURAL RELIABILITY ANALYSIS OF TRUSSES’ JOINTS BASED ON P-BOXES

Abstract

The article presents a new approach to probabilistic analysis of reliability for steel trusses’ joints based on p-boxes. The p-box is an area formed by two boundary cumulative distribution functions (CDFs) inside which there is a real cumulative distribution function (which is unknown due to the epistemic uncertainty of statistical data). The research demonstrates an algorithm for arithmetic operations with p-boxes by discretizing them into the Dempster-Shafer structures. Information about the failure probability of trusses’ joints is necessary to consider the truss reliability as a mechanical serial system in terms of reliability theory. The use of p-boxes makes it possible to obtain a more cautious model of a random variable due to the absence of the need to adopt some statistical hypotheses about the type of probability distribution of various random variables in mathematical models.