Reliability analysis of Reissner plate bending problems by stochastic spline fictitious boundary element method

In this paper the stochastic spline fictitious boundary element method (SFBEM) is presented for reliability analysis of Reissner plate bending problems in conjunction with the first-order reliability method (FORM). As a modified method for the conventional indirect boundary element method, SFBEM has been proved to be accurate and efficient in deterministic analyses. For the purpose of structural reliability analysis, SFBEM is introduced during the iteration process performed in the FORM to obtain the required values of structural responses and their derivatives with respect to the random variables considered. In particular, the gradient formulation for the Reissner plate bending problem has been derived using SFBEM in the current study. The present approach is validated with several numerical examples and a good agreement with solutions of the Monte Carlo simulation is observed.