Reliability-based design integrating system topology and structural components

Abstract

System reliability-based design is attracting more and more attention as an important tool to decrease the probability of failure. So far, reliability-based methods are studied separately from two aspects: system topology design and structural components design. Actually, system topology and structural components should be designed at the same time when facing a system design problem. In this paper, in order to reflect the dynamic interaction between system topology and structural components, a reliability-based design framework integrating system topology and structural components is proposed. The proposed framework would be widely applicable for more and more complicated systems with higher reliability requirements. An illustrated example is provided to demonstrate the proposed framework.