A robust and efficient structural reliability method combining radial-based importance sampling and Kriging

Simulation based structural reliability analysis suffers from a heavy computational burden, as each sample needs to be evaluated on the performance function, where structural analysis is performed. To alleviate the computational burden, related research focuses mainly on reduction of samples and application of surrogate model, which substitutes the performance function. However, the reduction of samples is achieved commonly at the expense of loss of robustness, and the construction of surrogate model is computationally expensive. In view of this, this paper presents a robust and efficient method in the same direction. The present method uses radial-based importance sampling (RBIS) to reduce samples without loss of robustness. Importantly, Kriging is fully used to efficiently implement RBIS. It not only serves as a surrogate to classify samples as we all know, but also guides the procedure to determine the optimal radius, with which RBIS would reduce samples to the highest degree. When used as a surrogate, Kriging is established through active learning, where the previously evaluated points to determine the optimal radius are reused. The robustness and efficiency of the present method are validated by five representative examples, where the present method is compared mainly with two fundamental reliability methods based on active learning Kriging.