AKSE: A novel adaptive Kriging method combining sampling region scheme and error-based stopping criterion for structural reliability analysis

The reliability analysis of complex structures usually involves implicit performance function and expensive-to-evaluate computational models, which pose a great challenge for the estimation of failure probability. In this paper, an adaptive Kriging-based method is proposed for the efficient estimation of failure probability with high accuracy. Starting from a small set of initial design of experiments (DoE), a Kriging model is constructed and iteratively refined by adding judiciously selected sample points to the DoE. To effectively select more sample points for updating the Kriging model, a new learning function is proposed for the selection of representative samples following the idea of the penalty function method in optimization. Besides, the inclusion of the term that measures the distance between the candidate samples and those in DoE controls the density of samples, and thus enables efficient exploration of the regions of interest. To improve the efficiency of the algorithm, this learning function is integrated with a sampling region scheme to filter out sample points in regions with rather low probability density from the candidate sampling pool. Moreover, a convergence criterion based on the error-based stopping criterion is developed to terminate the learning process at an appropriate stage. Hence, the proposed method is referred to as the Adaptive Kriging method combining Sampling region scheme and Error-based stopping criterion (AKSE). To further explore the possible schemes for the improvement of the proposed method, the combinations of AKSE with a dynamic Kriging method and the bootstrap variance are also investigated. For rare failure events, the Monte Carlo simulation (MCS) in AKSE is replaced by the importance sampling (IS) to establish an improved version of AKSE, namely the AKSE-IS. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated through five numerical examples and the results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method both in terms of accuracy and efficiency.