CQ2RS: a new statistical approach to the response surface method for reliability analysis

Assessing the reliability of a complex structure requires a deal between reliability algorithms and numerical methods used to model the mechanical behavior. The Response Surface Method (RSM) represents a convenient way to achieve this purpose. The interest of such a method is that the user is allowed to choose and check the computed mechanical experiments. Nevertheless, this choice in an optimal way turns out to be not always an easy task. This paper proposes a response surface method named CQ2RS (Complete Quadratic Response Surface with ReSampling) allowing to take into account the knowledge of the engineer on one hand and to reduce the cost of the reliability analysis using a statistical formulation of the RSM problem on the other hand. Some academic and industrial examples illustrate the efficiency of the method. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.