Title: Adaptive trust regions and response surfaces for reliability analysis

Authors: Tong Zou, Sankaran Mahadevan, Zissimos P. Mourelatos

Addresses: Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Vanderbilt University, P.O. Box 1831B, Nashville TN 37235, USA. ' Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Vanderbilt University, P.O. Box 1831B, Nashville TN 37235, USA. ' Department of Mechanical Engineering, Oakland University, Rochester MI 48309-4478, USA

Abstract: An efficient method for the reliability analysis of systems with non-linear limit states is presented in this paper. A trust-region-based adaptive response surface is used to search for the most probable point on the limit state. The adaptive response surface construction is aided by an optimal symmetric Latin hypercube sampling-based experimental design. First-order and second-order reliability estimates using the adaptive response surface are further improved with multi-modal adaptive importance sampling. Numerical examples including a vehicle side impact problem show that the proposed method has desirable efficiency and accuracy.

Keywords: reliability analysis; trust region; response surface methodology; RSM; Latin hypercube design; adaptive importance sampling; vehicle side impact; design optimisation; vehicle design; uncertainty.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMPT.2006.008275

International Journal of Materials and Product Technology, 2006 Vol.25 No.1/2/3, pp.84 - 98

Published online: 28 Nov 2005 *

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