Dynamic reliability analysis and design for complex engineered systems

Abstract

Ensuring a high level of system reliability throughout a product life-cycle is one of paramount tasks for engineering design, which requires new reliability analysis and design techniques to effectively address the challenges of system design under time-variant probabilistic constraints, such as those induced by time-dependent loading condition and system component deterioration. Extensive reviews on existing literature on reliability analysis and reliability based design optimization for complex engineered systems have identified important challenge problems to be addressed in this research, which have been organized into three research thrusts as follows: -Reliability Analysis using Surrogate Models: In this research thrust, the objective is to develop a robust approach to approximate static reliability efficiently and accurately based on surrogate models. Two challenge problems will be addressed: (1) How to evaluate fidelity of surrogate models and accuracy of reliability approximation based on those models, and (2) How to efficiently update a surrogate model if it does not meet the accuracy requirement. -Reliability Analysis with Time-variant Probabilistic Constraints. In this research thrust, the objective is to develop an efficient approach for dynamic reliability analysis considering time-variant probabilistic constraints. There are two challenges to be addressed: (1) How to handle the time-dependency of system failure events in dynamic reliability analysis, and (2) How to improve the efficiency of dynamic reliability analysis. -Reliability Analysis with Multiple System Failure Modes. The objective of this thrust is to develop a novel system reliability analysis framework to address a grand challenge in design that multiple system failure modes must be addressed concurrently to ensure a high level of system reliability.