Strength reliability of composite laminated structures relates to a series of parameters such as the design sizes, material parameters and load level. By introducing the Monte Carlo simulation and response surface method respectively, a static strength-based reliability model is proposed to predict the reliability of aluminium-carbon fiber/epoxy composite laminates for composite vessels The burst pressure of composite vessels for different layer structures is predicted using finite element analysis In the reliability analysis, two design parameters for composite vessels, the radius of polar axis and the winding thickness of each composite layer at the cylinder are assumed to obey the uniform distribution and Gaussian distribution respectively, and the burst pressure of composite vessels is taken as the random output response Effects of the number of sampling and the limit strength on the strength reliability of composite vessels are explored Besides, the numerical results obtained using two methods and two distributions for two random input parameters are compared in terms of the calculation efficiency and accuracy Numerical results also indicate the proposed probability method exhibits preferable advantage over the conventional design method merely using empirical safety coefficient (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd All rights reserved.