A general active-learning method for surrogate-based structural reliability analysis

Surrogate models aim to approximate the performance function with an active-learning design of experiments (DoE) to obtain a sufficiently accurate prediction of the performance function's sign for an inexpensive computational demand in reliability analysis. Nevertheless, many existing active-learning methods are limited to the Kriging model, while the uncertainties of the Kriging itself affect the reliability analysis results. Moreover, the existing general active-learning methods may not achieve a fully satisfactory balance between accuracy and efficiency. Therefore, a novel active-learning method GLM-CM is constructed to yield the issues, which conciliates several merits of existing methods. To demonstrate the performance of the proposed method, four examples, concerning both mathematical and engineering problems, were selected. By benchmarking obtained results with literature findings, various surrogate models combined with the proposed method not only provide an accurate reliability evaluation while highly alleviating the computational burden, but also provides a satisfactory balance between accuracy and efficiency compared to the other reliability methods.