Performance measure approach based sequential reliability analysis of multidisciplinary systems

To resolve the low computing efficiency of the existing reliability analysis methods of multidisciplinary systems, a performance measure approach based sequential approach to reliability analysis of multidisciplinary systems was proposed. In this approach, system analysis, system sensitivity analysis and reliability analysis were arranged in a sequential manner to form a recursive loop and thus eliminated the repeated total computation of the optimization model in the optimizer. System analysis and system sensitivity analysis provided the value and gradient information of limit-state function for reliability analysis respectively. The modified advanced mean value method was used in reliability analysis, which reduced the number of subsystem analysis. Meanwhile, the global sensitivity equation was adopted during the process of system sensitivity analysis to implement subspace sensitivity analysis concurrently, therefore, the efficiency of reliability analysis was improved. The high computational efficiency of proposed method was verified with two examples.