STRUCTURAL RELIABILITY ANALYSIS USING CHARGED SYSTEM SEARCH ALGORITHM

This paper focuses on the design point and the failure probability of problems with
continuous random variables. The charged system search (CSS) algorithm is utilized as the
optimization tool to achieve minimum reliability index under limit state function. In order to
acquire the optimal solution, random variables such as elastic modulus, loads, and geometric
parameters are selected as decision variables of the problem which are optimized by means of the
CSS algorithm. This algorithm is inspired by the Coulomb and Gauss’s laws of electrostatics from
physics. In order to evaluate the accuracy and efficiency of this algorithm, several numerical
examples are studied and the results are compared to those of the existing methods.
The proposed method is capable of finding a design point over the failure surface and calculates
the reliability index with a reasonable accurately. As the proposed framework enforces low
computational time and holds a satisfactory convergence rate, it is a competent methodology to
calculate different types of reliability problems.