System reliability assessment of deteriorating structures subjected to time-invariant loads based on improved moment method

The time-variant system reliability analysis is a significant topic in the field of reliability engineering. Although progress has been made, there remain multiple challenges in the existing methods including the explosive number of possible failure modes, requiring correlation information, and excessive computational efforts. In the present work, an improved moment method with high accuracy, efficiency and robustness is proposed for system reliability analysis of deteriorating structures. First, by introducing the complete system failure process, an equivalent time dependent performance function describing a deteriorating structural system is obtained. Second, a point estimate method based on the adaptive trivariate dimensional decomposition is adopted to calculate the first six moments of the performance function. And third, a saddlepoint approximation involving the first six moments is developed to estimate the system failure probability. Several examples are investigated to verify the accuracy, efficiency and stability of the proposed method. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.