Monte Carlo Methods for Estimating the Extreme Response of Dynamical Systems

The development of simple accurate, and efficient methods for estimation of the extreme response of dynamical systems subjected to random excitations is discussed in the present paper. The key quantity for calculating the statistical distribution of extreme response is the mean level upcrossing rate function. By exploiting the regularity of the tail behavior of this function, an efficient simulation based methodology for estimating the extreme response distribution function is developed. This makes it possible to avoid the commonly adopted assumption that the extreme value data follow an appropriate asymptotic extreme value distribution, which would be a Gumbel distribution for the models considered in this paper. It is demonstrated that the commonly quoted obstacle against using the standard Monte Carlo method for estimating extreme responses, i.e., excessive CPU time, can be circumvented, bringing the computational efforts down to quite acceptable levels.