Reliability of a system is the probability that it will function as intended for the required period of time. The opposite of reliability is failure probability per unit time or over time, such as a life cycle. Following a review of existing reliability codes and approaches, comprehensive approaches to assess the reliability of offshore structures are described, including probabilistic analysis...

We examine a new form of smooth approximation to the zero one loss in which learning is performed using a reformulation of the widely used logistic function. Our approach is based on using the posterior mean of a novel generalized BetaBernoulli formulation. This leads to a generalized logistic function that approximates the zero one loss, but retains a probabilistic formulation conferring a num...

This note describes a selection procedure for genetic algorithms called Boltzmann tournament selection. As simulated annealing evolves a Boltzmann distribution in time using the Metropolis algorithm or a logistic acceptance mechanism, Boltzmann tournament selection evolves a Boltzmann distribution across a population and time using pairwise probabilistic acceptance and anti-acceptance mechanism...