ABSTRACT
Ultimately, structural reliability analysis is used to evaluate failure probability, the probability content in the failure set of the probability space. Difficulty in computing this probability has led to the development of various approximation methods. Of interest here is the second-order reliability method (SORM), wherein the limit state surface is approximated by a second-order surface in transformed standard normal space, and the failure probability is given as the probability content outside the second-order surface (Fiessler et al. 1979; Der Kiureghian et al. 1987, 1991; Tvedt 1988, 1990).
