Structural Reliability Assessment Based on Enhanced Conjugate Unscented Transformation and Improved Maximum Entropy Method
Publication: Journal of Structural Engineering
Volume 147, Issue 12
Abstract
Estimation of statistical moments remains one of the main topics of stochastic analysis whose accuracy greatly affects reliability analysis results. In this work, conjugate unscented transformation (CUT) methods, which can balance accuracy and efficiency, are introduced for the statistical moment estimation of responses. Because of the drawbacks of existing CUT methods, a family of enhanced conjugate unscented transformation (ECUT) methods, including ECUT-4, ECUT-6, and ECUT-8 methods, is proposed for statistical moment estimation by combining the original CUT, variable transformation, and exact dimension reduction method. Then the probability density function of a performance function is reconstructed by the improved maximum entropy method (IMEM) with the available statistical moments as constraints. To demonstrate the accuracy and effectiveness of the proposed methods, five numerical examples, including linear and nonlinear, low-dimensional and high-dimensional, and explicit and implicit performance functions, are investigated, in which the results obtained from the proposed methods are compared with other existing moment methods and a Monte Carlo simulation (MCS) method. The results of the examples show that the proposed ECUT-6 and ECUT-8 methods have fairly high accuracy and efficiency for structural reliability analysis.
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Data Availability Statement
Some or all data, models, or code that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to acknowledge the support of the National Key R&D Program of China (Grant No. 2019YFD1101003), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 51678092 and 51478064), and NSFC-JSPS China-Japan Scientific Cooperation Project (NSFC Grant No. 51611140123). In addition, the authors would also like to express gratitude to the associate editor and the two anonymous reviewers for their vital and insightful suggestions and comments.
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Received: Feb 4, 2021
Accepted: Jul 26, 2021
Published online: Sep 28, 2021
Published in print: Dec 1, 2021
Discussion open until: Feb 28, 2022
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