Assessing the Reliability of Truss Structures Based on the Bound Method and Collectively Exhaustive Events

Damage to long-span truss structures may cause structural deformation, load-capacity reduction, and even collapse. The design service life of truss structures is usually 50 years, so evaluating their reliability is the utmost importance. Reliability considers the probability of failure as an analysis index. In calculating the probability of structural failure, important components are first selected to form a failure path, and then the failure probability corresponding to the failure path is calculated. A truss structure has many important components and failure paths, so calculating this probability requires extensive and thorough work. As a result, we propose selecting the important components via the approximation method to reduce the influence of the threshold of approximation. Collectively exhaustive events were established using the differential equivalent recursive algorithm to calculate the probability of structural failure. This process was considerably simplified, and validity was verified via a reliability analysis involving a three-bar truss structure, a plane truss structure, and a square pyramid truss structure. This method is suitable for selecting important components of regular truss structures.