Targeted Testing for Reliability Validation

Methods for designing targeted tests for reliability validation of structures obtained from reliability-based design are presented. These methods optimize the test parameters to minimize the variance in the estimated reliability (or equivalently the failure probability) estimated from the tests. The tests are designed using information from analytical models used to design the structure. Both analytical tests, in which very detailed models are used as reference, or physical tests can be designed using the methods presented. The methods are demonstrated on examples and their robustness to errors in the analytical models used to design the tests is assessed.