Structural reliability analysis using temporal deep learning-based model and importance sampling

The main idea of the framework is to seamlessly combine a reasonably accurate and fast surrogate model with the importance sampling strategy. Developing a surrogate model for predicting structures' dynamic responses is challenging because it involves high-dimensional inputs and outputs. For this purpose, a novel surrogate model based on cutting-edge deep learning architectures specialized for capturing temporal relationships within time-series data, namely Long-Short term memory layer and Transformer layer, is designed. After being properly trained, the surrogate model could be utilized in place of the finite element method to evaluate structures' responses without requiring any specialized software. On the other hand, the importance sampling is adopted to reduce the number of calculations required when computing the failure probability by drawing more relevant samples near critical areas. Thanks to the portability of the trained surrogate model, one can integrate the latter with the Importance sampling in a straightforward fashion, forming an efficient framework called TTIS, which represents double advantages: less number of calculations is needed, and the computational time of each calculation is significantly reduced. The proposed approach's applicability and efficiency are demonstrated through three examples with increasing complexity, involving a 1D beam, a 2D frame, and a 3D building structure. The results show that compared to the conventional Monte Carlo simulation, the proposed method can provide highly similar reliability results with a reduction of up to four orders of magnitudes in time complexity.