Structural reliability assessment based on particles swarm optimization

The PSO algorithm is very efficient to solve global optimization problems with continuous variables. Its use in the structural reliability field presents not only the advantage of its facility of implementation, but also the possibility to obtain the design point and the failure probability with a good accuracy. Several examples of the literature studied in this paper show that the results yielded by PSO are quasi-exact with respect to those yielded by MC and response surface methods. The low computing time of this zero order algorithm is also a great advantage to solve optimization problem. Therefore, this algorithm can be considered as an additional efficient algorithm to those existing in the literature based on gradient method.