A response surface approach for structural reliability analysis using evidence theory

•A RS approach for structural reliability analysis using evidence theory is proposed.•A design of experiments technique is proposed to guarantee the RS precision.•The results of the numerical examples show pretty good efficiency and precision.

Evidence theory employs a much more general and flexible framework to quantify the epistemic uncertainty, and thereby it is adopted to conduct reliability analysis for engineering structures recently. However, the large computational cost caused by its discrete property significantly influences the practicability of evidence theory. This paper proposes an efficient response surface (RS) method to evaluate the reliability for structures using evidence theory, and hence improves its applicability in engineering problems. A new design of experiments technique is developed, whose key issue is the search of the important control points. These points are the intersections of the limit-state surface and the uncertainty domain, thus they have a significant contribution to the accuracy of the subsequent established RS. Based on them, a high precise radial basis functions RS to the actual limit-state surface is established. With the RS, the reliability interval can be efficiently computed for the structure. Four numerical examples are investigated to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.