Alternative Methods for Reliability-Based Robust Design Optimization Including Dimension Reduction Method

Abstract

The objective of reliability-based robust design optimization (RBRDO) is to minimize the product quality loss function subject to probabilistic constraints. Since the quality loss function is usually expressed in terms of the first two statistical moments, mean and variance, many methods have been proposed to accurately and efficiently estimate the moments. Among the methods, the univariate dimension reduction method (DRM), performance moment integration (PMI), and percentile difference method (PDM) are recently proposed methods. In this paper, estimation of statistical moments and their sensitivities are carried out using DRM and compared with results obtained using PMI and PDM. In addition, PMI and DRM are also compared in terms of how accurately and efficiently they estimate the statistical moments and their sensitivities of a performance function. In this comparison, PDM is excluded since PDM could not even accurately estimate the statistical moments of the performance function. Also, robust design optimization using DRM is developed and then compared with the results of RBRDO using PMI and PDM. Several numerical examples are used for the two comparisons. The comparisons show that DRM is efficient when the number of design variables is small and PMI is efficient when the number of design variables is relatively large. For the inverse reliability analysis of reliability-based design, the enriched performance measure approach (PMA+) is used.