Time-dependent reliability problems widely appear in the engineering practice when the material properties of the structure deteriorate in time or random loading modeled as random processes is involved. Among existing methods to the time-dependent reliability problems, the most dominating one is the outcrossing rate method. This paper presents an outcrossing rate model and its efficient calculation approach for system problems, and based on the presented model, a time-dependent system reliability analysis method is proposed. The main idea of the method is to transform the evaluation of the system outcrossing rates into the calculation of a time-invariant system reliability. Three numerical examples are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

In the process of long-term use, the uncertainty of an engineering structure often presents time-variant or dynamic characteristics due to the influence of stochastic loads and material performance degradations. In such a situation, the structural design optimization will involve an important problem of time-variant reliability-based design optimization (TRBDO). Performing TRBDO involves a nested optimization, which will lead to extremely low computational efficiency. In this paper, a single-loop approach (SLA) is proposed to convert the nested optimization in TRBDO into a sequence iterative process composed of the time-variant reliability analysis (TRA), constraint discretization, and design optimization. In each iteration step, the TRA method based on stochastic process discretization is first used to calculate the time-variant reliability of constraints; second, through introducing the concept of the target reliability index of discretized time period and proposing the corresponding algorithm, each time-variant constraint is discretized into a series of time-invariant constraints to formulate a conventional reliability-based design optimization problem. The approach exhibits a good comprehensive performance in terms of efficiency and convergence. The validity and practicality of the SLA are validated by two numerical examples and a design problem for the chassis of a self-balancing vehicle.

Although a series of decoupled or single loop methods have been developed for reliability-based design optimization (RBDO) problems to improve the computational efficiency, it seems hard to extend these strategies to time-variant RBDO due to the complexity of the problems brought by the involvement of time. This paper proposes a new approach for time-variant reliability-based design optimization, expecting to provide an efficient tool for design of some complex structure under time-variant uncertainties. The main idea of the proposed method is the definition of the equivalent most probable point (EMPP). With the EMPP, the original time-variant RBDO problem can be transformed into an equivalent time-invariant RBDO problem formulated by performance measure approach (PMA). Hence, the existing PMA-based time-invariant RBDO methods can be applied to solve the equivalent problem. Therefore, those RBDO methods can be easily extended to time-variant RBDO problems, and hence the computational cost can be effectively reduced. Finally, two numerical examples and an engineering application are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.