In reliability analysis of structures, stochastic processes have been applied to model structural loads and environmental hazards. The homogenous Poisson process (HPP) has been widely used to model structural loads. In the HPP model, the inter-arrival time of events follows the exponential distribution which leads to a constant occurrence rate. However, this process may result in some shortcomings in the short remaining life of structures. An alternative option is renewal process which is a more general model of structural loads. Regarding non-exponential distributions for inter-arrival time of events, the obtained occurrence rate from this process is time-dependent. The main purpose of this paper is to evaluate the reliability level of structures by considering the stochastic renewal process and the HPP model for structural loads. For this purpose, a formulation for estimation of structural reliability level is provided and the obtained results from regarded stochastic renewal process are compared to the HPP model through a case study. In addition, the effect of different stochastic processes and different renewal models of inter-arrival time distributions on the structural reliability is investigated. The results indicate that assuming HPP for earthquake events may underestimate the failure probability of structures, particularly if the construction time of structure is close to the mean recurrence time of events.
