ABSTRACT
Reliability analysis of nonlinear structures in the presence of major sources of nonlinearity is becoming an integral part of performance-based design guidelines. Finite element method is routinely used for the realistic representation of nonlinear structural behavior. However, the use of nonlinear finite element method will make the performance or limit state function, generally required for the reliability analysis, to be implicit. The authors propose a reliability evaluation technique when the limit state function is implicit. In this paper, the concept is extended to dynamic problems. The unique feature of this approach is that the uncertain dynamic loadings, including seismic loading, can be applied in time domain for the reliability evaluation.