An efficient method for solving high-dimension stationary FPK equation of strongly nonlinear systems under additive and/or multiplicative white noise

Engineering structures may suffer from drastic nonlinear random vibrations in harsh environments. Random vibration has been extensively studied since 1960s, but is still an open problem for large-scale strongly nonlinear systems. In this paper, a random vibration analysis method based on the Neural Networks for large-scale strongly nonlinear systems under additive and/or multiplicative Gaussian white noise (GWN) excitations is proposed. In the proposed method, the high-dimensional steady-state Fokker–Planck-Kolmogorov (FPK) equation governing the state’s probability density function (PDF) is firstly reduced to low-dimensional FPK equation involving only the interested state variables, generally one or two dimensions. The equivalent drift coefficients (EDCs) and diffusion coefficients (EDFs) in the low-dimensional FPK equation are proven to be the conditional mean of the coefficients given the interested variables. Furthermore, it is shown that the conditional mean can be optimally estimated by regression. Subsequently, the EDCs and EDFs, as functions of the retained variables, are approximated by the semi-analytical Radial Basis Functions Neural Networks trained with samples generated by a few deterministic analyses. Finally, the Physics Informed Neural Network is employed to solve the reduced steady-state FPK equation, and the PDF of the system responses is obtained. Four typical examples under additive and/or multiplicative GWN excitations are used to examine the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed method by comparing its results with the exact solution (if available) or Monte Carlo simulations. The proposed method also exhibits greater accuracy than the globally-evolving-based generalized density evolution equation scheme, a similar method of its kind, especially for strongly nonlinear systems. Notably, even though steady-state systems are applied in this paper, there is no obstacle to extending the proposed framework to transient systems.