An Efficient Reliability Method with Multiple Shape Parameters Based on Radial Basis Function

Abstract

Structural reliability analysis has an inherent contradiction between efficiency and accuracy. The metamodel can significantly reduce the computational cost of reliability analysis by a simpler approximation. Therefore, it is crucial to build a metamodel, which achieves the minimum simulations and accurate estimation for reliability analysis. Aiming at this, an effective adaptive metamodel based on the combination of radial basis function (RBF) model and Monte Carlo simulation (MCS) is proposed. Different shape parameters are first used to generate the weighted prediction variance, and the search for new training samples is guided by the active learning function that achieves a tradeoff of (1) being close enough to limit state function (LSF) to have a high reliability sensitivity; (2) keeping enough distance between the existing samples to avoid a clustering problem; and (3) being in the sensitive region to ensure the effectiveness of the information obtained. The performance of the proposed method for a nonlinear, non-convex, and high dimensional reliability analysis is validated by three numerical cases. The results indicate the high efficiency and accuracy of the proposed method.