Reliability assessment of wall-frame structures

Assessment of the reliability of wall-frame structures using simulation based method is often prohibited by the costly and lengthily computations. The present paper introduces a response surface based technique to quickly extract the reliability and safety information. The proposed method couples the finite element (FE) model of wall-frame structure, an improved response surface scheme and the second order reliability method (SORM). At the beginning, the large number of the random variables is reduced via preliminary sensitivity analysis. Then, the failure region is reached through a repetitive strategy integrated with recommended experimental designs. The efficiency and accuracy of the scheme are verified using Monte Carlo simulation. Moreover, both serviceability and flexural limit states are used in the verification. Tens of simulations are used instead of hundreds or thousands. The method is simple, efficient and can be easily implemented. For the considered example, the lateral load and the wall stiffness are the most important variables.