Reliability assessment of structural system based on a directional importance sampling simulation method
Okuda Shoya; Yonezawa Masaaki; Shao Shaowen; Murotsu Yoshisada
Abstract:This paper provides an improved directional simulation method to estimate the structural failure probability. A method is proposed to construct a directional importance sampling density, which generates more samples of direction vectors in the direction where the limit state surfaces are closer to the origin. The proposed method is composed of two-stage procedures. In the first stage, a preliminary simulation is executed to search the distances from the origin to the limit state surfaces in the directions normal to finite element meshes allocated on the unit sphere. A directional importance sampling density is constructed so as to be proportional to the upper probability of c2 distribution corresponding to each distance. In the second stage, a directional importance sampling simulation is executed to estimate the structural failure probability.