A collocation reliability analysis method for probabilistic and fuzzy mixed variables

The main bottleneck of the reliability analysis of structures with aleatory and epistemic uncertainties is the contradiction between the accuracy requirement and computational efforts. Existing methods are either computationally unaffordable or with limited application scope. Accordingly, a new technique for capturing the minimal and maximal point vectors instead of the extremum of the function is developed and thus a novel reliability analysis method for probabilistic and fuzzy mixed variables is proposed. The fuzziness propagation in the random reliability, which is the focus of the present study, is performed by the proposed method, in which the minimal and maximal point vectors of the structural random reliability with respect to fuzzy variables are calculated dimension by dimension based on the Chebyshev orthogonal polynomial approximation. First-Order, Second-Moment (FOSM) method which can be replaced by its counterparts is utilized to calculate the structural random reliability. Both the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed method are validated by numerical examples and engineering applications introduced in the paper.