Evidence-theory-based structural reliability analysis with epistemic uncertainty: a review

Abstract

Epistemic uncertainty widely exists in the early design stage of complex engineering structures or throughout the full-life cycle of innovative structure design, which should be appropriately quantified, managed, and controlled to ensure the reliability and safety of the product. Evidence theory is usually regarded as a promising model to deal with epistemic uncertainty, as it employs a general and flexible framework, the basic probability assignment function, which enables the quantification and propagation of epistemic uncertainty more effective. Due to its strong ability, evidence theory has been applied in the field of structural reliability during the past few decades, and a series of important progresses have been achieved. Evidence-theory-based reliability analysis thus provides an important means for engineering structure design, especially under epistemic uncertainty, and it has become one of the research hotspots in the field of structural reliability. This paper reviews the four main research directions of evidence-theory-based reliability analysis, and each one is focused on solving one critical issue in this field, namely, computational efficiency, parameter correlation, hybrid uncertainties, and reliability-based design optimization. It summarizes the main scientific problems, technical difficulties, and current research status of each direction. Based on the review, this paper also provides an outlook for future research in evidence-theory-based structural reliability analysis.