Research Article Dynamic Reliability Evaluation of Road Vehicle Subjected to Turbulent Crosswinds Based on Monte Carlo Simulation Bin Wang, 1,2 Yongle Li, 1 Helu Yu, 1 and Haili Liao 1 1 Department of Bridge Engineering, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu 610031, China 2 Key Laboratory of Transportation Tunnel Engineering, Ministry of Education, Chengdu 610031, China Correspondence should be addressed to Bin Wang; wangbinwvb@home.swjtu.edu.cn Received 17 September 2016; Revised 13 December 2016; Accepted 28 December 2016; Published 29 January 2017 Academic Editor: Sakdirat Kaewunruen Copyright © 2017 Bin Wang et al. Tis is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. As a vehicle moves on roads, a complex vibration system of the running vehicle is formed under the collective excitations of random crosswinds and road surface roughness, together with the artifcial handing by the drivers. Several numerical models in deterministic way to assess the safety of running road vehicles under crosswinds were proposed. Actually, the natural wind is a random process in time domain due to turbulence, and the surface roughness of a road is also a random process but in spatial domain. Te nature of a running vehicle therefore is an extension of dynamic reliability excited by random processes. Tis study tries to explore the dynamic reliability of a road vehicle subjected to turbulent crosswinds. Based on a nonlinear vibration system, the dynamic responses of a road vehicle are simulated to obtain the dynamic reliability. Monte Carlo Simulation with Latin Hypercube Sampling is then applied on the possible random variables including the vehicle weight, road friction coefcient, and driver parameter to look at their efects. Finally, a distribution model of the dynamic reliability and a corresponding index for the wind-induced vehicle accident considering these random processes and variables is proposed and employed to evaluate the safety of the running vehicle. 1. Introduction In crosswinds, road vehicles can be turned over or blown of from their original lanes [1, 2], which may lead to a huge loss of property or even bring away many lives. Terefore, the evaluation of the wind-induced performance of vehicles has been focused on continually in the last decades [3–7]. In these studies, the wind-vehicle systems are treated in deterministic ways and pairs of fxed critical wind velocity and vehicle speed are conducted. Actually, several factors such as the vehicles’ parameters, the wind velocity, and the road surface roughness are random variables or processes. Te critical wind velocity and vehicle speed therefore become indefnite. A general probabilistic model for the safety of road vehicle in windy condition was presented frstly by Sigbj¨ ornsson and Snæbj¨ ornsson [8] to explore the indefnite in the wind- vehicle system. Like other system variables, the wind velocity was also taken as a random variable in this model. And the accident index based on the safety limit states was calculated. Te system employed in this model is simplifed too much, and the adoption of a more realistic dynamic vehicle model is deemed necessary particularly when complicated driving conditions are considered. Tus, F. Chen and S. Chen [9] pro- posed a framework of a reliability-based assessment model of the vehicle safety under complex driving environments. In this framework, response surface method was applied to approximate the reliability index as the functions of the system variables, and the wind velocity was also accepted as a random variable. In the wind-induced performance analysis on road vehicles, wind velocity is a random process rather than a random variable. Considering the wind velocity only as a random variable excludes the wind-induced dynamic efects on the vehicles in nature. Another risk assessment procedure for wind-vehicle system was reported by Proppe and Wetzel [10]. Te turbulent crosswind was replaced with a gust wind model, of which the peak and duration are random variables. More complex situation like the random road roughness and driver behaviors was not explored in [8– 10]. Hindawi Shock and Vibration Volume 2017, Article ID 2365812, 12 pages https://doi.org/10.1155/2017/2365812