An Outcrossing Rate Model and Its Efficient Calculation for Time-Dependent System Reliability Analysis

Time-dependent reliability problems widely appear in the engineering practice when the material properties of the structure deteriorate in time or random loading modeled as random processes is involved. Among existing methods to the time-dependent reliability problems, the most dominating one is the outcrossing rate method. This paper presents an outcrossing rate model and its efficient calculation approach for system problems, and based on the presented model, a time-dependent system reliability analysis method is proposed. The main idea of the method is to transform the evaluation of the system outcrossing rates into the calculation of a time-invariant system reliability. Three numerical examples are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.