Abstract
With the increasing complexity of engineering systems, ensuring high system reliability and system performance robustness throughout a product life cycle is of vital importance in practical engineering design. Dynamic reliability analysis, which is generally encountered due to time-variant system random inputs, becomes a primary challenge in reliability-based robust design optimization (RBRDO). This article presents a new approach to efficiently carry out dynamic reliability analysis for RBRDO. The key idea of the proposed approach is to convert time-variant probabilistic constraints to time-invariant ones by efficiently constructing a nested extreme response surface (NERS) and then carry out dynamic reliability analysis using NERS in an iterative RBRDO process. The NERS employs an efficient global optimization technique to identify the extreme time responses that correspond to the worst case scenario of system time-variant limit state functions. With these extreme time samples, a kriging-based time prediction model is built and used to estimate extreme responses for any given arbitrary design in the design space. An adaptive response prediction and model maturation mechanism is developed to guarantee the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed NERS approach. The NERS is integrated with RBRDO with time-variant probabilistic constraints to achieve optimum designs of engineered systems with desired reliability and performance robustness. Two case studies are used to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach.