An improved TRPD method for time-variant reliability analysis.

In this paper, an improved time-variant reliability analysis method based on stochastic process discretization (iTRPD) is proposed. Firstly, the time-variant reliability problem is transformed into a time-invariant series system reliability problem. Then the first order reliability method (FORM) is employed to analyze the reliability of each component of the system, and a corresponding approach is given to calculate the correlation coefficient matrix of all the components’ performance functions. Finally, the target time-variant reliability can be obtained with the reliability index vector and the correlation coefficient matrix of the involved components. In this study, the iTRPD is further applied to the system reliability problems, and hence a corresponding time-variant system reliability analysis method is also developed. Four numerical examples are investigated to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]