An efficient method for estimating time-dependent global reliability sensitivity

Time-dependent global reliability sensitivity can quantify the effect of input variables in their whole distribution ranges on the time-dependent failure probability. To efficiently estimate it to help researchers control the time-dependent failure probability, a novel method is proposed. The proposed method transforms the estimation of unconditional-conditional time-dependent failure probabilities into that of the unconditional-conditional probability density functions (PDFs) of the minimum of time-dependent performance function. Firstly, the minimum of time-dependent performance function is evaluated by adaptive Kriging, and its unconditional-conditional fractional moments are estimated by multiplicative dimensional reduction method (M-DRM). Then, the maximum entropy (MaxEnt) constrained by these fractional moments is used to estimate the unconditional-conditional PDFs, on which the unconditional-conditional time-dependent failure probabilities can be obtained. Finally, the one-dimensional Gaussian quadrature is applied to estimate the time-dependent global reliability sensitivity indices. Due to the high efficiency of adaptive Kriging for estimating the minimum of time-dependent performance function, the avoidance of dimensional curse by M-DRM, and the high efficiency of MaxEnt constrained by fractional moments for estimating PDF, the proposed method can reduce the computational cost dramatically.