The structural composition of the oil platform is very complicated, and its working environment is harsh, thus conducting a large number of reliability tests is not feasible, and the field tests are also hard to accomplish. So the reliability of the oil platform cannot be analyzed and calculated by the traditional reliability method which needs a lot of test data, and new methods should be studied. In recent years, imprecise probability theory has attracted more and more attention because when unified, it can quantify hybrid uncertainty. Structural reliability analysis on the basis of imprecise probability theory has made remarkable achievements in theoretical aspects, but it is scarcely used in practical engineering domains due to the complexity in the developed methods and the unavailability of suitable or specific modeling steps for applications. In this regard, we propose a unified quantification method for statistical data, fuzzy data, incomplete information, and the like, which can handle the issue of hybrid uncertainties, and then, we construct an improved imprecise structural reliability model aiming at the practical problems by introducing copula function. To verify the existing methodology, we also consider a cantilever beam widely applied in the oil platform here for the structural reliability analysis.
An improved approach by introducing copula functions for structural reliability analysis under hybrid uncertainties
