Application of generalised equivalent extreme-value event in structural system reliability analysis.

To alleviate the difficulty of combination explosion, in this work, a generalised equivalent extreme-value event is presented to the problem of multi-component simultaneous failure in system reliability analysis, where m components in total l components are failed simultaneously. Firstly, the generalised equivalent extreme-value event is formulated with rigorous mathematical derivation for single boundary problem. Secondly, based on a mathematical transformation, the generalised equivalent extreme-value event is extended to double boundaries problem. Thirdly, by introducing the point estimation method (PEM) and the principle of maximum entropy to calculate the first four-order statistical moments and the failure probability of the equivalent performance function, an easy-to-implement method is proposed, which is capable of solving the multi-component simultaneous failure problem of static and dynamic systems. Finally, the feasibility of the proposed method is verified through a mathematical example and two engineering examples. The comparison to the Monte Carlo simulation shows that the proposed method is of high precision and high efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]