STRUCTURAL RELIABILITY ANALYSIS USING CHARGED SYSTEM SEARCH ALGORITHM

Abstract

This paper focuses on the design point and the failure probability of problems withcontinuous random variables. The charged system search (CSS) algorithm is utilized as theoptimization tool to achieve minimum reliability index under limit state function. In order toacquire the optimal solution, random variables such as elastic modulus, loads, and geometricparameters are selected as decision variables of the problem which are optimized by means of theCSS algorithm. This algorithm is inspired by the Coulomb and Gauss's laws of electrostatics fromphysics. In order to evaluate the accuracy and efficiency of this algorithm, several numericalexamples are studied and the results are compared to those of the existing methods.The proposed method is capable of finding a design point over the failure surface and calculatesthe reliability index with a reasonable accurately. As the proposed framework enforces lowcomputational time and holds a satisfactory convergence rate, it is a competent methodology tocalculate different types of reliability problems.