Reliability-based structural optimization

This thesis presents the reader the importance of optimization and probabilistic assessment of structures for civil engineering problems. Chapter 2 further investigates the combination between previously proposed optimization techniques and probabilistic assessment in the form of optimization constraints. Academic software has been developed for the purposes of demonstrating the effectiveness of the suggested methods and their statistical testing. 3th chapter summarizes the results of testing previously described optimization method (called Aimed Multilevel Sampling), including a comparison with other optimization techniques. In the final part of the thesis, described procedures have been demonstrated on the selected optimization and reliability problems. The methods described in text represents engineering approach to optimization problems and aims to introduce a simple and transparent optimization algorithm, which could serve to the practical engineering purposes