An adaptive order response surface method for structural reliability analysis

Abstract

Purpose

Balancing accuracy and efficiency is an important evaluation index of response surface method. The purpose of this paper is to propose an adaptive order response surface method (AORSM) based on univariate decomposition model (UDM).

Design/methodology/approach

First, the nonlinearity of the univariate function can be judged by evaluating the goodness of fit and the error of curve fit rationally. Second, combining UDM with the order analysis of separate component polynomial, an easy-to-implement AORSM is proposed. Finally, several examples involving mathematical functions and structural engineering problems are studied in detail.

Findings

With the proposed AORSM, the orders of component functions in the original response surface can be determined adaptively and the results of those cases in this paper indicate that the proposed method performs good accuracy, efficiency and robustness.

Research limitations/implications

Because just the cases with single failure mode and single MPP are studied in this paper, the application in multi-failure mode and multi-MPP cases need to be investigated in the coming work.

Originality/value

The nonlinearity of the univariate in the response surface can be determined adaptively and the undetermined coefficients of each component function are obtained separately, which reduces the computation dramatically.

Citation

Zhang, W. and Xiao, Y. (2019), "An adaptive order response surface method for structural reliability analysis", Engineering Computations, Vol. 36 No. 5, pp. 1626-1655. https://doi.org/10.1108/EC-09-2018-0428