Robustness analysis of trusses with separable load and structural uncertainties

This paper discusses evaluation techniques of the robustness function of trusses, which is regarded as one of measures of structural robustness, under the uncertainties of member stiffnesses and external forces. By using quadratic embedding of the uncertainty and the S-procedure, we formulate a quasiconvex optimization problem which provides lower bounds of the robustness functions. A bisection method is proposed, where we solve a finite number of semidefinite programming problems in order to obtain a global optimal solution to the proposed quasiconvex optimization problem. The lower bounds of the robustness functions are computed for various trusses under several uncertainty circumstances. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.