Software for Uncertainty Propogation and Reliability Assessment of Inelastic Wind Excited Systems

Abstract

This paper presents a software tool for carrying out reliability assessment of inelastic wind excited systems through direct stochastic simulation. The tool address the need for practical approaches that enable efficient evaluation of the safety of such systems in order to apply probabilistic performance-based design in wind engineering. In particular, the software application is based on a recently proposed reliability assessment framework that integrates efficient inelastic response estimation approaches with a novel stochastic simulation scheme to propagate a full range of code compliant uncertainties through inelastic systems. The eight tabs of the graphical user interface of the software are designed to offer a user-friendly environment to specify all relevant data in order to define and solve reliability analysis problems that are at the core of modern performance-based wind engineering. The potential and applicability of the software are illustrated on a 3-dimensional archetype building.