Evaluation Of Structure Life-cycle Cost Based On Non-probabilistic Methods

Performance based seismic design is the tendency of structural design in the future, andthe cost-effectiveness criterion which minimizes the structural life-cycle cost is the mainprinciple. Although the probabilistic method is the common way to evaluate the life-cyclecost, it's hard to obtain the probability distributions when the enough sampling data are notavailable. Under such circumstances, the evaluation of the structural life-cycle by non-probabilistic theory is focused in this paper. The main work is as follows:Firstly, the reliability index for interval variables based on probability andnon-probability theory are discussed, using probabilistic reliability index based on generaldefinition and truncated distribution, respectively. The accordance and difference betweenprobabilistic and non-probabilistic reliability for performance evaluation (safe or failure)under different cases are given. Then, the reliability index based on interval theory andellipsoid theory are compared and the condition that these two types of index are consistentwhen quantifying the reliability are obtained. Finally, we evaluate the structural life-cycle costusing probabilistic, interval non- probabilistic and fuzzy theory, and discuss the results.