An efficient approach to reliability-based design optimization within the enhanced sequential optimization and reliability assessment framework

Reliability based design optimization (RBDO) has been widely implemented in engineering practices for high safety and reliability. It is an important challenge to improve computational efficiency. Sequential optimization and reliability assessment (SORA) has made great efforts to improve computational efficiency by decoupling a RBDO problem into sequential deterministic optimization and reliability analysis as a single-loop method. In this paper, in order to further improve computational efficiency and extend the application of the current SORA method, an enhanced SORA (ESORA) is proposed by considering constant and varying variances of random design variables while keeping the sequential framework. Some mathematical examples and an engineering case are given to illustrate the proposed method and validate the efficiency.