A novel experimental data-driven exponential convex model for reliability assessment with uncertain-but-bounded parameters

The convex model is commonly applied to quantify the uncertain-but-bounded parameters. However, the typical interval and ellipsoid models may lead to inaccurate approximation for existing experimental data, which may incur either too risk or conservative for safety assessment. To this end, this study aims to create a novel data-driven exponential convex model to achieve accurate approximation for experiment data, in which the dimension reduction minimum volume method plays the key role. Furthermore, a novel relaxed exponential nominal value method (RENVM) is developed to evaluate the corresponding non-probabilistic reliability index robustly and efficiently, and the sensitivities are also derived based on the straight forward perturbation method to guarantee its efficiency. Through numerical and experimental studies, the accuracy and validity of the proposed data-driven exponential convex model are validated compared to the interval and ellipsoid models, and the robustness and efficiency of the proposed RENVM are also demonstrated for solving both linear and nonlinear problems. (C) 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.