Novel decoupling method for time-dependent reliability-based design optimization

Time-dependent reliability-based design optimization (RBDO) can provide the optimal design parameter solutions for the time-dependent structure, and thus plays a significant role in engineering application. Directly solving the time-dependent RBDO needs a nested double-loop optimization procedure, which undoubtedly leads to large computational costs. A novel decoupling method called two-step method (TSM) is proposed to efficiently solve the time-dependent RBDO. In the two-step method, the first step makes the minimum instantaneous reliability index satisfy the reliability target index by solving a transformed time-independent RBDO, and the second step performs time-dependent reliability analysis and deterministic optimization to obtain the optimal design parameters which meet the reliability target. Only a few time-dependent reliability analyses and several deterministic optimizations are involved in the proposed procedure; thus, the time-dependent RBDO can be efficiently solved. Several examples containing one numerical example and two engineering examples are introduced to show the effectiveness of the proposed TSM.