An efficient quantum computing based structural reliability analysis method using quantum amplitude estimation

Abstract

Efficient structural reliability analysis methods are of great concern in civil engineering. Although excellent works have be dedicated in the past years for improving the computation efficiency in classical computer, the development of quantum computer has shown new potential to further extend the boundary of computation efficiency. In this paper, an efficient quantum computing based structural reliability assessment method is proposed. Compared with the Monte Carlo method in classical computer, the major advantage of quantum amplitude estimation method is that the computation cost is reduced from $O\left(N\right)$ to $O\left(\sqrt{N}\right)$ for the failure probability being $O\left(1/N\right)$. The present study formulated the reliability problems by means of quantum computing using quantum amplitude estimation. And a simple numerical application example is given to verify the proposed method with comparison to Monte Carlo method.