Epistemic uncertainty quantification techniques including evidence theory for large-scale structures

Over the last decade, probability theory has been studied and embedded in engineering structural design through uncertainty quantification (UQ) analysis, instead of simply assigning safety factors. However, recently it has been found by the scientific and engineering community that there are limitations in using only one framework (probability theory) to quantify the uncertainty in a system because of the impreciseness of data or knowledge. In this paper, evidence theory is proposed as an alternative to the classical probability theory to handle the imprecise data situation. The possibility of adopting evidence theory as a general tool of UQ analysis for large-scale built up structures is investigated with an algorithm that can alleviate the computational difficulties.