Parametric Assessment of Uncertainties in Reliability Index of Reinforced Concrete MRF Structures Using Incremental Dynamic Analysis

Recently, increasing attention has been paid to reliability based design methods due to its ability to consider different uncertainties associated with demand and capacity. Recent studies show that presence of unaccounted uncertainty may inflict unacceptable bias to computation of reliability index.
Exact computations of global reliability index for multi-member structures are only possible through simulation methods. Therefore, researchers have proposed numerous methods using simplified assumption for reliability index calculation. Each method is different in the simplicity and accuracy it offers. For this purpose, in assessment of the effect of different uncertainty different methods of record selection for IDA analysis, probabilistic distribution of demand data and demand-capacity relation assumptions were used in this study to compute reliability index for “Operational”, “Immediate Occupancy”, “Life Safety” and “Collapse Prevention” limit states. The results showed that considering epistemic uncertainty in record selection and probabilistic distribution dramatically affects the reliability index and thus should be considered in future analyses.