Decomposable polynomial response surface method and its adaptive order revision around most probable point

As the classical response surface method (RSM), the polynomial RSM is so easy-to-apply that it is widely used in reliability analysis. However, the trade-off of accuracy and efficiency is still a challenge and the “curse of dimension” usually confines RSM to low dimension systems. In this paper, based on the univariate decomposition, the polynomial RSM is executed in a new mode, called as DPRSM. The general form of DPRSM is given and its implementation is designed referring to the classical RSM firstly. Then, in order to balance the accuracy and efficiency of DPRSM, its adaptive order revision around the most probable point (MPP) is proposed by introducing the univariate polynomial order analysis, noted as RDPRSM, which can analyze the exact nonlinearity of the limit state surface in the region around MPP. For testing the proposed techniques, several numerical examples are studied in detail, and the results indicate that DPRSM with low order can obtain similar results to the classical RSM, DPRSM with high order can obtain more precision with a large efficiency loss; RDPRSM can perform a good balance between accuracy and efficiency and preserve the good robustness property meanwhile, especially for those problems with high nonlinearity and complex problems; the proposed methods can also give a good performance in the high-dimensional cases.