Ring simulation: A novel simple and efficient simulation method for structural reliability analysis

Abstract

In this paper, a novel simulation method, referred to as “ring simulation”, is proposed. The method estimates the failure probability only using the information from the importance interval of the radius, i.e., the hyper-spherical ring, where the contributions to the failure probability are dominant. A stepwise computing procedure is proposed to determine the importance interval and simultaneously obtain the failure probability, in which samples are uniformly generated in the importance interval. The variability of the proposed method for the evaluation of the failure probability is also investigated. The accuracy, efficiency, and robustness of the proposed method are demonstrated through four examples involving the multiple design points, existence of local minima, small failure probability, and highly nonlinear, implicit, and high-dimensional limit state functions. The results reveal that the proposed method is almost as simple and applicable as crude Monte Carlo simulation method, but more efficient. Compared with directional simulation, subset simulation, and weighted average simulation, the proposed method has shown its advantage.