An improved adaptive response surface method for structural reliability analysis

The response surface method (RSM) is one of the main approaches for analyzing reliability problems with implicit performance functions. An improved adaptive RSM based on uniform design (UD) and double weighted regression (DWR) was presented. In the proposed method, the basic principle of the iteratively adaptive response surface method is applied. Uniform design is used to sample the fitting points. And a double weighted regression system considering the distances from the fitting points to the limit state surface and to the estimated design points is set to determine the coefficients of the response surface model. Compared with the conventional approaches, the fitting points selected by UD are more representative, and a better approximation in the key region is also observed with DWR. Numerical examples show that the proposed method has good convergent capability and computational accuracy.