The oil and gas industry has moved towards Load and Resistance Factor Design through API RP2A LRFD and the recently published international standard, ISO-19902, for design of fixed steel offshore structures. The ISO 19902 is intended to provide a harmonized design practice that offers a balanced structural fitness for the purpose, economy and safety. As part of an ongoing work, the reliability ...

It is essential to consider the acceptable threshold in the assessment of a hydrological model because of the scarcity of research in the hydrology community and errors do not necessarily cause risk. Two forecast errors, including rainfall forecast error and peak flood forecast error, have been studied based on the reliability theory. The first order second moment (FOSM) and bound methods are u...

While most prognostics approaches focus on accurate computation of the degradation rate and the Remaining Useful Life (RUL) of individual components, it is the rate at which the performance of subsystems and systems degrade that is of greater interest to the operators and maintenance personnel of these systems. Accurate and reliable predictions make it possible to plan the future operations of ...

The old hierarchical stochastic load combination model of Ferry Borges and Castanheta and the corresponding problem of determining the distribution of the extreme random load effect is the inspiration to this paper. The evaluation of the distribution function of the extreme value by use of a particular first order reliability method (FORM) was first described in a celebrated paper by Rackwitz a...

Monte Carlo simulation (MCS) is a useful tool for computation of probability of failure in reliability analysis. However, the large number of samples, often required for acceptable accuracy, makes it time-consuming. Importance sampling is a method on the basis of MCS which has been proposed to reduce the computational time of MCS. In this paper, a new adaptive importance sampling-based algorith...