Application of Latin Hypercube Sampling Based Kriging Surrogate Models in Reliability Assessment

Reliability assessment is one of the necessary and critical parts in structural design under uncertainties. The methods for structural reliability assessment aim at evaluating the probability of limit state by considering the fluctuation of acting loads, variation of structural component or system, and complexity of operating environment. Latin Hypercube sampling (LHS) method as advanced Monte Carlo simulation (MCS) has higher efficiency in sampling. It will be chosen and applied in this paper in order to obtain an effective database for building Kriging surrogate models. In this paper, we propose an effective method to have reliability assessment by Latin Hypercube sampling based Kriging surrogate models. This method keeps the certain level of accuracy in prediction of the response of a structural finite element model or other explicit mathematical functions.