FAST FAILURE MODE-IDENTIFICATION FOR DUCTILE STRUCTURAL SYSTEM RELIABILITY

This paper presents a method for fast plastic hinge imposition and system collapse mode identification in large ductile framed structures. The proposed method follows the general scheme of the truncated enumeration method, but makes use of the statistical correlations between different member limit states to impose groups of hinges at each selection level instead of one plastic hinge at a time as used in the previous studies, thus making the search for significant failure modes very rapid. This results in an efficient and accurate method for system reliability estimation. The proposed method is illustrated with the help of numerical examples.