POSSIBILISTIC SAFETY ASSESSMENT OF HYBRID UNCERTAIN SYSTEMS

Abstract

The safety evaluations of structures are usually performed by assuming uncertain 18 input parameters either as probabilistic or possibilistic in nature. Safety evaluations of structural systems characterized by some of the input parameters as possibilistic and others that are sufficient enough to model as probabilistic are unsuitable and restricted to gross assumption at early stages of modeling. The present paper deals with the safety analysis of such a hybrid uncertain system. Relying on the fundamental concept of entropy-based transformation; the feasibility of reliability analysis of a hybrid uncertain system in a possibilistic format is demonstrated in the present study. This will enable the designers to model the structural parameter uncertainty probabilistically as well possibilistically depending on the nature and quality of the input data. The bounds on the probability of failure based on the evidence theory are also computed to study the consistency of the possibility of failure results obtained by the transformation-based algorithm. A numerical example illustrates the capability of the proposed possibilistic approach of safety evaluation of hybrid uncertain system.