Uniform importance sampling with rejection control for structural reliability analysis

Highly efficient, accurate and robust structural reliability analysis (SRA) method enables a wide range of engineering applications. In this paper, a novel variance reduction technique-based SRA method is proposed considering uniform importance sampling with rejection control (UIS-RC) for efficiently approximating the probability of failure. Besides, an adaptive sampling interval p selection strategy and an adaptive threshold constant C is proposed. Seven cases illustrate the effectiveness of this method in accuracy, efficiency and robustness. The characteristics of the key parameters are discussed in Discussion. The results for comparing UIS-RC with well-known simulation methods indicated that the proposed UIS-RC method is suitable for nonlinear, nonnormal, low failure probability, high-dimensional and high computational cost problems with lower coefficient of variation by repeated runs.