Structural Reliability Analysis Using Combined Space Partition Technique and Unscented Transformation

In this paper, a new approach for estimating the probability of failure is proposed. The method works by dividing the input space into subspaces with the Voronoi diagram and applying the unscented transformation in each subspace. The probability of failure is defined as the sum of the products of the expectation of the failure domain indicator function and the corresponding weight in subspaces. A small number of samples is needed for this method to get a failure probability estimation with high accuracy. The efficiency and robustness of the proposed method are investigated by solving several examples. The results are compared with results of other reliability methods, and they demonstrate the efficiency and robustness of the proposed method.