A new response surface approach for time-variant reliability analysis

This paper presents a new approach, referred to as the nested extreme response surface (NERS), to efficiently carry out time-dependent reliability analysis and determine the optimal designs. The key of the NERS is to convert the time-dependent reliability analysis to time-independent one through constructing a kriging based nested time prediction model. The efficient global optimization technique is integrated with NERS to extract the extreme time responses of limit state functions and an adaptive response prediction and model maturation mechanism is developed for an optimal balancing of the model accuracy and the computational efficiency. With the nested response surface of time, existing advanced reliability analysis and design methods can be used. The NERS approach is integrated with RBDO for the design of engineered systems with time-dependent probabilistic constraints. The case study results demonstrate the accuracy and the effectiveness of the proposed approach.