A SEQUENTIAL RESPONSE-SURFACE METHOD AND ITS APPLICATION IN THE RELIABILITY-ANALYSIS OF AIRCRAFT STRUCTURAL SYSTEMS

The reliability analysis of aircraft structural systems is difficult t o evaluate due to the complexity of the g-function g(x), the probabili ty density function f(x> and the dimension m of the problem. In many c ases, the g-function can be very complex and the number of evaluation of g(x) may dominate the computation cost. Response Surface Methods ma y alleviate the problem by giving a simple approximation, g'(x), to th e true g-function, which can then be used instead of g(x) for the reli ability analysis. In this paper, a new Sequential Response Surface Met hod together with Monte Carlo Importance Sampling (MCIS) is suggested. Based on the method, a reliability analysis program RSM for aircraft structural systems is developed. Several examples are presented to ill ustrate the method.