Structural response analysis under dependent variables based on probability boxes (Q1665788)

Summary: This paper considers structural response analysis when structural uncertainty parameters distribution cannot be specified precisely due to lack of information and there are complex dependencies in the variables. Uncertainties in parameter are quantified by probability boxes (\(p\)-boxes) and dependence among uncertain parameters is modeled by copula. To calculate uncertainty structural response, a sampling-based method is proposed. In this method, a sampling strategy is used to sample random intervals from dependent \(p\)-boxes according to the copula theory and the metamodel-based optimization method is applied to solve a range of structural interval response problems. Two types of errors are presented to evaluate the error of different \(p\)-boxes. Four numerical examples are investigated to demonstrate the effectiveness of the present method.