An Integrated Performance Measure Approach for System Reliability Assessment

This paper presents an integrated performance measure approach (iPMA) for system reliability assessment considering multiple dependent failure modes. An integrated performance function is developed to envelope all component level failure events, thereby enables system reliability approximation by considering only one integrated system limit state. The developed integrated performance function possesses two critical properties. First, it represents exact joint failure surface defined by multiple component failure events, thus no error will be induced due to the integrated limit state function in system reliability computation. Second, smoothness of the integrated performance on system failure surface can be guaranteed, therefore advanced response surface techniques can be conveniently employed for response approximation. With the developed integrated performance function, the maximum confidence enhancement based sequential sampling method is adopted as an efficient component reliability analysis tool for system reliability approximation. To furthermore improve the computational efficiency, a new constraint filtering technique is developed to adaptively identify active limit states during the iterative sampling process without inducing any extra computational cost. One case study is used to demonstrate the effectiveness of system reliability assessment using the developed iPMA methodology.