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.