A novel simplified geotechnical reliability analysis method

Abstract

• A new reliability method with complexity close to the first-order second-moment is proposed. • Numerical examples show that the method is as accurate as the first-order reliability method but requires less computation. • The method can be conducted in the physical space of random variables without any optimization involved. • The method is insensitive to the algebraic form of the performance function. This paper proposes a novel reliability analysis method with simplicity close to the first-order second-moment method, yet with accuracy close to the first-order reliability method. This method is called the quantile-based first-order second-moment method because it shares similar computation complexity with first-order second-moment method. The main differences between the proposed method and first-order second-moment method include: (a) the proposed method requires an extra root-finding step; and (b) the partial differentiation in the proposed method is evaluated with respect to the quantile position of each random variable. Three geotechnical examples are employed to demonstrate the performance of the proposed method.