Reliability of elastic-plastic structures

The plasticity theory is, in itself, deterministic, but in the physical context all the data of the problems are affected with uncertainty. So the problem arises of a probabilistic approach to the theory of elastic-plastic structures. After a brief presentation of the principal probabilistic concepts the lecture will consider the problem of plastic limit analysis in the probabilistic context. The presentation starts with the definition of the plastic limit domain in the space of all the parameters considered as free. Then, giving to the parameters their probabilistic character, a probabilistic theory is developed, which holds both for the case of one loading condition and for the case of repeated loadings. The important numerical difficulties involved in the above presented theory are briefly discussed and the consequent opportunity of looking for approximate approaches is thus presented. (orig.)