Abstract Civil infrastructure can be subjected to different deterioration scenarios (e.g., continuous deterioration and sudden events) during its service life. Time-dependent reliability analysis of a deteriorating system is of vital importance in the structural design, assessment, and management process. In this paper, a general and novel probability density function-informed framework for time-dependent reliability analysis is developed, considering different deterioration processes and system-level performance. Both continuous deterioration and sudden events are considered within the proposed framework. For the scenario with random sudden drops and/or significant differences in deterioration rates, a novel two-step translation method is proposed to assess the probability density of the performance function within the service life of a structure. In this method, translation operation is conducted twice; the first time to build a virtual and differentiable performance function, and the second, to solve the actual probability density function based on the results from the first step. Then, three illustrative examples are assessed: a simple deteriorating case, a component-level case, and a system-level case. The relevant results demonstrate the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed method.

中文翻译：

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受连续恶化和突发事件影响的结构瞬态可靠性的两步转换方法

摘要 民用基础设施在其使用寿命期间会遭受不同的恶化情景（例如，持续恶化和突发事件）。退化系统的瞬态可靠性分析在结构设计、评估和管理过程中至关重要。在本文中，考虑到不同的退化过程和系统级性能，开发了一种用于瞬态可靠性分析的通用且新颖的概率密度函数通知框架。在提议的框架内考虑了持续恶化和突发事件。对于随机突然下降和/或劣化率存在显着差异的场景，提出了一种新的两步平移方法来评估结构使用寿命内性能函数的概率密度。在这种方法中，翻译操作进行了两次；第一次构建虚拟的可微性能函数，第二次根据第一步的结果求解实际概率密度函数。然后，评估了三个说明性示例：一个简单的恶化案例、一个组件级案例和一个系统级案例。相关结果证明了该方法的可行性和有效性。