phimeca-soft

This paper provides a presentation of phimeca software for reliability analysis. The completion of this software has been achieved thanks to years of experience at the French Institute for Advanced Mechanics and phimeca engineering company is developing the commercial version. First, inherent hypotheses of first/second order and conditional simulation methods are briefly stated and their implementation discussed. Algorithms combining the physical model under concern – defined through an explicit formula, a finite element code computation or a user-defined function – and a stochastic model of the input are then presented to the reader. A special attention is given to the graphical user interface GUI in this paper so as to comply with the objectives of this special issue of “Structural Reliability Software” and the use of the GUI is illustrated through a very basic example. To conclude, a significant industrial application is presented demonstrating the capabilities of the software in the context of a large finite element model and a non-linear material behaviour.