The effect of interactions between failure mechanisms on the reliability of flood defenses
研究了防洪设施中不同失效机制（如边坡失稳和管涌）之间的相互作用如何影响系统可靠性，发现相互作用可使失效概率增加多达4倍，对评估和设计有重要启示。
Structural reliability analysis often considers failure mechanisms as correlated but non-interacting processes. Interacting failure mechanisms affect each others performance, and thereby the system reliability. We describe such interactions in the context of flood defenses, and analyze under which conditions such interactions have a large impact on reliability using a Monte Carlo-based quantification method. We provide simple examples and an application to levee failure due to landward slope instability and backward erosion piping (BEP). The examples show that the largest interaction effects are expected when the trigger mechanism is relatively likely to occur and the affected mechanism has a relatively large contribution to the system reliability. For the studied levee example, interactions between slope instability and BEP increased the failure probability up to a factor 4. Implications for the assessment and design of flood defenses are discussed.