Abstract: Identification of dominant failure modes is one of the most critical problems for structural system reliability analysis. In this paper, the recent research progress and existing disadvantages for traditional methods for identification of dominant failure modes is reviewed first. To overcome the disadvantages of traditional approaches for identification of dominant failure modes in which the computational efficiency and accuracy cannot always be guaranteed due to the fact that the bounding thresholds are determined by engineering experience, an adaptive dynamic bounding method for structural system analysis is proposed. Meanwhile, to overcome the disadvantages of the traditional methods of high computational cost and low efficiency due to the behavior of failure path dependency, a failure path-independent method is presented for structural system reliability analysis. The efficiency and applicability of the proposed methods are verified through two numerical examples.