Optimization and risk acceptability based on the Life Quality Index

Optimization techniques are essential ingredients of reliability-oriented optimal designs of technical facilities. Suitable objective functions are presented for different replacement strategies for structural facilities. Within FORM/SORM structural reliability analysis can be reduced to an optimization task and some simple algebra. However, instead of a optimization of cost on top of a optimization for the reliability task, a one-level optimization is proposed by adding the Kuhn–Tucker conditions of the locally stationary reliability problem to general cost-benefit optimization. For locally non-stationary failure phenomena a bilevel optimization must be used. A rational basis to account for the cost of saving lives based on the recently proposed Life Quality Index is presented. Several examples illustrate the methodology. # 2002 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.