Estimation Of Structural Reliability When Strength Is Degradation Variable

Structural reliability is an important problem in the reliability science. Themeasure of structural reliability is defined as the probability of that strength is greaterthan the stress. There are two main aspects of structural reliability problem, the designand the estimation of structural reliability. The estimation of structural reliability notonly performs as a tool to measure the reliability of the structure, but also plays animportant role in checking the effect of the design of structural reliability. This topicwas once a hot spot of reliability statistics and its new trend is to extend the strengthand stress to stochastic processes. This paper would combine the problem of thestructural reliability with another current issue in reliability statistics, the degradationproblem, and discuss the estimation methods of structural reliability when the strengthis a degradation amount.The research in this paper contained two parts. In the first part, the strength wasdescribed by degradation path model. With combining the classic theory of estimationof structural reliability and the statistic methods to deal with degradation data, severalkinds of point and interval estimation of structural reliability was given. In the secondpart, both strength and stress were regarded as Brownian motion and some newmethods of estimation of structural reliability in this case were proposed. Monte Carlosimulation was used to examine the effect of these methods and showed that most ofthe results are satisfactory. The methods and results in this paper had a certaintheoretical significance and application value.