Estimation of the lower and upper bounds on the probability of failure using subset simulation and random set theory

•The lower and upper bounds of the probability of failure are formulated using random set theory.•The estimation of those bounds is performed using subset simulation.•The bounds can be estimated using any method that calculates probabilities of failure in the standard Gaussian space.•Numerical examples are provided. Random set theory is a general framework which comprises uncertainty in the form of probability boxes, possibility distributions, cumulative distribution functions, Dempster-Shafer structures or intervals; in addition, the dependence between the input variables can be expressed using copulas. In this paper, the lower and upper bounds on the probability of failure are calculated by means of random set theory. In order to accelerate the calculation, a well-known and efficient probability-based reliability method known as subset simulation is employed. This method is especially useful for finding small failure probabilities in both low- and high-dimensional spaces, disjoint failure domains and nonlinear limit state functions. The proposed methodology represents a drastic reduction of the computational labor implied by plain Monte Carlo simulation for problems defined with a mixture of representations for the input variables, while delivering similar results. Numerical examples illustrate the efficiency of the proposed approach.