SOFTWARE FOR RELIABILITY-BASED ANALYSIS

The paper presents a concept for software designed specifically for reliability based structural analysis. While incorporating traditional Finite-Element-Analysis (FE), the software concentrates on the treatment of the randomness of loads and structural parameters as extension of the usual design variables. A completely interactive program structure based on the so-called Structural Language (SLang) enables the transfer of data between different computational tasks. In this context, the utilization of third-party FE-codes is possible and has been successfully tested. In its final form, the software will rely on specifically designed FE software currently under development. This will enable the realization of a COSSAN (Computational Stochastic Structural Analysis) package. Several examples show the realization of the software and application to engineering problems.