SENSITIVITY ANALYSIS OF STRUCTURAL RELIABILITY TO RANDOM VARIABLES AND FAILURE-MODE CORRELATION FACTORS AND ITS APPLICATION IN ENGINEERING

Many uncertainties cause unavoidable risk in engineering planning and decision. With more and more important projects such as Three-gorge project, South-North Water Transfer Project etc. being carried out now in China, more concerns are given to engineering safety and the decrease of risk in engineering structures. But unfortunately there is no scientific method to reduce engineering risk. Most methods are based on engineers' experience. In this paper, reliability theory is used, starting from sensitivity analysis and including that of structural reliability to random variables and that of structural reliability to failure-mode correlation factors. Some methods are proposed to reduce the engineering risk through increasing or decreasing the values of stochastic variables or failure-mode correlation factors. Two examples are analyzed with the proposed method to show its application in engineering.