  One of the methods to design products is reliability-based design, in which
failure probability is usually used instead of safety factors. In the
technique, it should not be less than a predetermined value. Choosing the
proper design criterion is a challenging problem for designers who are dealing
with the technique, particularly, when there are various criteria. One of these
kinds of products is a cylindrical pressure vessel which has diverse criteria
proposed in the literature to calculate the burst pressure as a start point of
the design. In this paper, we are going to evaluate and compare the
performances of various burst pressure criteria in estimating failure
probability which is used for a sample pressure vessel. For each criterion,
Monte Carlo simulation has been employed to calculate the probability of
failure due to variations related to major design variables. The design
parameters include material properties and operating pressure. First, the
effects of variations in standard deviations of the design variables on the
calculated burst probabilities have been determined by standard deviation
analysis. Then, sensitivity analyses were carried out to assess the sensitivity
of each burst pressure criterion against changes in the magnitude of design
variables.
