On general purpose software in structural reliability – An overview

In this Special Issue of Structural Safety on “Structural Reliability Software”, the developers of leading software codes for reliability analysis and stochastic mechanics describe the present status of their developments. The included papers give an account of the various software tools that have evolved to capture random variations in material properties, geometry, loads, etc., and therefore afford a rational treatment of the effects of uncertainty.The objective of the present paper is first to give an overview of the the included papers and hence to provide some guidance to the reader. In addition, the paper aims to go beyond mere contemplation, by critically evaluating the papers with respect to a set of issues faced more or less by all developers of this type of software. These issues include of course the algorithms underlying the code, but also the interaction with deterministic FE-codes. Furthermore, topics such as the availability of graphical user interfaces, distributed computing, verification features and probabilistic modeling capabilities are addressed.The main conclusions drawn at the end of the paper are that the capability of interaction with third party FE codes is a key asset and that the potential of parallel processing, while its importance has been recognized, is not yet exploited. Furthermore, the examples discussed in the various papers show that the codes can be applied to large-scale problems, but some limitations appear to persist with respect to the number of random variables and, in some cases, to the calculation of very low (failure) probabilities.