An integrated analysis and design approach for stochastic optimization of structures is presented. The proposed procedure employs a first order second moment (FOSM) method for evaluating the constraints associated with structural safety.
Two variants of the new approach are presented. The idea is to integrate the nested iterative procedures for constraint evaluation and optimum search into one. The new approach is applied to simple design examples. The results are compared to those obtained by classical stochastic optimization using the FOSM method to evaluate the constraints. Both methods are robust to a satisfactory degree and substantially reduce the computational effort.
Communicated by J. Sobieski