A Structural Reliability Analysis Method Based on Radial Basis Function

Abstract

The first-order reliability method (FORM) is one of the most widely used structural reliability analysis techniques due to its simplicity and efficiency. However, direct using FORM seems disability to work well for complex problems, especially related to high-dimensional variables and computation intensive numerical models. To expand the applicability of the FORM for more practical engineering problems, a response surface (RS) approach based FORM is proposed for structural reliability analysis. The radial basis function (RBF) is employed to approximate the implicit limit-state functions combined with Latin Hypercube Sampling (LHS) strategy. To guarantee the numerical stability, the improved HL-RF (iHLRF) algorithm is used to assess the reliability index and corresponding probability of failure based on the constructed RS model. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated through five numerical examples.