Multiple failure modes analysis of the dam system by means of line sampling simulation

Abstract As the number of aging dams is increasing, an efficient and feasible probabilistic method is required to analyze the uncertainties of a dam system with multiple failure modes. Due to the limitation of huge computation of Direct Simulation Monte Carlo, a new method is introduced to solve the reliability problem of a dam system. This new method determines the failure domain of a complex structure by resorting to lines rather than random points. It is used to calculate the failure probability and reliability sensitivity of a gravity dam, which is a large, complex structure with small probability; and the basic Monte Carlo method is also used for comparison. Results show that the new method is more efficient and feasible to analyze the reliability of a dam system with small failure probability and multiple dimensionalities.