An importance sampling procedure for estimating failure probabilities of non-linear dynamic systems subjected to random noise

The first passage problem for linear and non-linear oscillators excited by white and coloured noise are considered. An iterative variance reduction scheme is used in a framework of a measure change in the space of sample functions according to the Girsanov transformation, which is based on introducing a Markov control process. It is proved that a good approximation to the optimal stochastic control process can be obtained from an equivalent white noise excited linear oscillator. It is shown that this leads to very accurate estimates of the failure probability of the original system. The advantage of this procedure is that expressions for the parameters of the equivalent linear system and the design point oscillations, which are needed to find the control process, are available analytically. The number of samples, the variance of the failure probability estimates and the computational time are reduced significantly compared with direct Monte Carlo simulations.