Incremental formulation for structural reliability analysis

The reliability of structures composed of many members may be estimated by considering all ways in which the structure may fail. Procedures to achieve this have been extensively explored for structures composed of rigid-ideal-plastic materials or members. However, there has been rather less consideration for structures with more general member properties. The present paper shows that subject to certain simplifying assumptions, the limit state equations necessary for reliability analysis using the truncated enumeration method previously developed by the authors can be derived in a systematic manner by using an extension of the incremental load procedure due to F. Moses.