Efficient adaptive importance sampling for time-dependent reliability analysis of structures

Various methods have been used by researchers to evaluate the time-dependent reliability of structures. Among them, the stochastic-process-based method is theoretically the most rigorous but also computationally the most expensive. To enable the wide application of the stochastic-process-based method in the time-dependent reliability analysis of complex problems, an efficient importance sampling method is presented. This new method, extended from an existing method for time-independent reliability analysis, offers an efficient solution for time-dependent problems of structural systems with multiple important regions. Furthermore, to enhance the efficiency and robustness of the proposed method, a number of numerical measures are proposed. The capability and efficiency of the proposed method are demonstrated through two numerical examples