Safety estimation of structural systems via interval analysis

Considering that the uncertain information has serious influences on the safety of structural systems and is always limited, it is reasonable that the uncertainties are generally described as interval sets. Based on the non-probabilistic set-theoretic theory, which is applied to measuring the safety of structural components and further combined with the branch-and-bound method for the probabilistic reliability analysis of structural systems, the non-probabilistic branch-and-bound method for determining the dominant failure modes of an uncertain structural system is given. Meanwhile, a new system safety measuring index obtained by the non-probabilistic set-theoretic model is investigated. Moreover, the compatibility between the classical probabilistic model as well as the proposed interval-set model will be discussed to verify the physical meaning of the safety measure in this paper. Some numerical examples are utilized to illustrate the validity and feasibility of the developed method.