Reliability Analysis With Model Uncertainty Coupling With Parameter and Experiment Uncertainties: A Case Study of 2014 Verification and Validation Challenge Problem

A validation strategy with copula-based bias approximation approach is proposed to address the 2014 Verification and Validation (V & V) challenge problem developed by the Sandia National Laboratory. The proposed work further incorporates model uncertainty into reliability analysis. Specific issues have been addressed including: (i) uncertainty modeling of model parameters using the Bayesian approach, (ii) uncertainty quantification (UQ) of model outputs using the eigenvector dimension reduction (EDR) method, (iii) model bias calibration with the U-pooling metric, (iv) model bias approximation using the copula-based approach, and (v) reliability analysis considering the model uncertainty. The proposed work is well demonstrated in the challenge problem.