A Novel Application of System Survival Signature in Reliability Assessment of Offshore Structures

Abstract

Offshore platforms are large structures consisting of a large number of components of various types. Thus a variety of methods are usually necessary to assess the structural reliability of these structures, ranging from Finite-Elements-methods to Monte-Carlo-Simulations. However, often reliability information is only available for the members and not for the overall, complex, system. The recently introduced survival signature provides a way to separate the structural analysis from the behaviour of the individual members. Thus it is then possible to use structural reliability methods to obtain information about how the failure of several constituent members of the offshore platform leads to overall system failure. This way it is possible to separate the structural from time-dependent information, allowing flexible and computationally efficient computation of reliability predictions.