SEQUENTIAL AND SINGLE LOOP METHODS FOR RELIABILITY-BASED DESIGN OPTIMIZATION AND ROBUST DESIGN
By Akhil Sopory
Thesis
Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
MASTER OF SCIENCE in
Civil Engineering
December, 2004
Nashville, Tennessee
Approved by Sankaran Mahadevan
Prodyot K. Basu
ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to take this opportunity to thank my advisor Dr. Sankaran Mahadevan for his extensive technical guidance and support throughout the course of this study. I would also like to acknowledge the technical inputs provided by Dr. Zissimos Mourelatos, Dr. Jian Tu, Dr. Tong Zou and fellow researchers in reliability and optimization methods at Vanderbilt.
I would also like to thank my friends and colleagues at Vanderbilt who made my stay extremely enjoyable and most importantly my parents who constantly supported me and encouraged me to reach higher.
This study was supported by funds from General Motors through purchase order no. ND0044200 (Project monitor: Dr. Jian Tu). The support is gratefully acknowledged.
