Response–Surface–Based Embankment Reliability under Incomplete Probability Information
Publication: International Journal of Geomechanics
Volume 17, Issue 12
Abstract
Reliability evaluations can be challenging if the limit-state surface (LSS) is implicit and the probability information is incomplete in that only marginal distributions and correlations are given. To address the problem, this study adopted the response-surface method based on an adaptive relevance vector machine (aRVM) to approximate the implicit LSS, and the copula approach was used to reconstruct the joint distributions based on incomplete probability information. The Rosenblatt transformation was used to transform the random variables from the original random space into the independent standard normal space for the first-/second-order reliability method (FORM/SORM) approximations. Five different copulas—the normal, Frank, Clayton, CClayton, and t copulas—were adopted to represent different dependence structures and examine their impacts on the failure probability. Results from the numerical example show that the copula effect was negligible if the shear strength parameters were uncorrelated or fully correlated. However, when the correlation coefficient was 0.6 or 0.8, the probabilistic result corresponding to the commonly used normal copula was 5.6% higher or 3.1% lower if the CClayton or the Frank copula was used to model the dependence structure, respectively.
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Acknowledgments
The following financial supports are acknowledged: (1) National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under Grant 51608399; (2) Fundamental Research Funds for Central Public Welfare Research Institutes (Changjiang River Scientific Research Institute CKSF2016037/GC); and (3) Youths Science Foundation of Wuhan Institute of Technology under Grant Q201602.
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Information & Authors
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Published In
International Journal of Geomechanics
Volume 17 • Issue 12 • December 2017
Copyright
© 2017 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Nov 4, 2016
Accepted: Jun 7, 2017
Published online: Sep 28, 2017
Published in print: Dec 1, 2017
Discussion open until: Feb 28, 2018
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