Automatic Generation of Stochastically Dominant Failure Modes for Large-scale Structures : Solid-Mechanisc, Strength of Materials

Abstract

This paper proposes a branch-and-bound technique which generates stochastically dominant structural failure modes by using a lower bound of the complete failure path probability. Combinatorial properties of the failure paths are clarified and it is shown that there are many complete failure paths in a large-scale structure with a high degree of redundancy. Then, in order to reduce the number of computations, heuristic operations are applied to the branch-and-bound algorithm. Finally, the validity of the heuristic operations is demonstrated through numerical examples.