Abstract: Various numerical methods have been extensively studied and used for reliability analysis over the past several decades. However, how to understand the effect of numerical uncertainty (i.e., numerical error due to the discretization of the performance function) on the failure probability is still a challenging issue. The active learning probabilistic integration (ALPI) method offers a principled approach to quantify, propagate and reduce the numerical uncertainty via computation within a Bayesian framework, which has not been fully investigated in context of probabilistic reliability analysis. In this study, a novel method termed `Parallel Adaptive Bayesian Quadrature' (PABQ) is proposed on the theoretical basis of ALPI, and is aimed at broadening its scope of application. First, the Monte Carlo method used in ALPI is replaced with an importance ball sampling technique so as to reduce the sample size that is needed for rare failure event estimation. Second, a multi-point selection criterion is proposed to enable parallel distributed processing. Four numerical examples are studied to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method. It is shown that PABQ can effectively assess small failure probabilities (e.g., as low as 10(-7)) with a minimum number of iterations by taking advantage of parallel computing.

Abstract: This contribution proposes an approach for the assessment of the failure probability associated with a particular class of series systems. The type of systems considered involves components whose response is linear with respect to a number of Gaussian random variables. Component failure occurs whenever this response exceeds prescribed deterministic thresholds. We propose multidomain Line Sampling as an extension of the classical Line Sampling to work with a large number of components at once. By taking advantage of the linearity of the performance functions involved, multidomain Line Sampling explores the interactions that occur between failure domains associated with individual components in order to produce an estimate of the failure probability. The performance and effectiveness of multidomain Line Sampling is illustrated by means of two test problems and an application example, indicating that this technique is amenable for treating problems comprising both a large number of random variables and a large number of components.

Abstract: Existing ensemble-learning methods for reliability analysis are usually developed by combining ensemble learning with a learning function. A commonly used strategy is to construct the initial training set and the test set in advance. The training set is used to train the initial ensemble model, while the test set is adopted to allocate weight factors and check the convergence criterion. Reliability analysis focuses more on the local prediction accuracy near the limit state surface than the global prediction accuracy in the entire space. However, samples in the initial training set and the test set are generally randomly generated, which will result in the learning function failing to find the real ???best??? update samples and the allocation of weight factors may be suboptimal or even unreasonable. These two points have a detrimental impact on the overall performance of the ensemble model. Thus, we propose a general hierarchical ensemble-learning framework (ELF) for reliability analysis, which consists of two-layer models and three different phases. A novel method called CESM-ELF is proposed by embedding the classical ensemble of surrogate models (CESM) in the proposed ELF. Four examples are investigated to show that CESM-ELF outperforms CESM in prediction accuracy and is more efficient in some cases.