A novel single-loop procedure for time-variant reliability analysis based on Kriging model

Abstract

• A novel single-loop procedure is proposed for time-variant reliability analysis. • Two commonly used learning functions and a new learning function are adopted to find the new point, respectively. • The comparison to Monte Carlo simulation indicates high accuracy and efficiency of the proposed method. This paper proposes a novel single-loop procedure for time-variant reliability analysis based on a Kriging model. A new strategy is presented to decouple the double-loop Kriging model for time-variant reliability analysis, in which the extreme value response in double-loop procedure is replaced by the best value in the current sampled points to avoid the inner optimization loop. Consequently, the extreme value response surface for time-variant reliability analysis can be directly established through a single-loop Kriging surrogate model. To further improve the accuracy of the proposed Kriging model, two methods are provided to adaptively choose a new sample point for updating the model. One method is to apply two commonly used learning functions to select the new sample point that resides as close to the extreme value response surface as possible, and the other is to apply a new learning function to select the new point. Synchronously, the corresponding different stopping criteria are also provided. It is worth nothing that the proposed single-loop Kriging model for time-variant reliability analysis is for a single time-variant performance function. To verify the proposed method, it is applied to four examples, two of which have with random process and others have not. Other popular methods for time-variant reliability analysis including the existing single-loop Kriging model are also used for the comparative analysis and their results testify the effectiveness of the proposed method.