Application of an improved sequential importance sampling for structural reliability analysis of aeronautical hydraulic pipeline with multiple stochastic responses

Estimating the failure probabilities of multiple failure modes is a challenging task in structural reliability analysis. The conventional sequential importance sampling (conventional SIS) fails to estimate all the failure probabilities in a single run, leading to high computational expense and low efficiency. To address this issue, this study provides an improvement for Sequential Importance Sampling (improved SIS), in which a unified failure event is defined to construct a sequence of intermediate sampling distributions. It iteratively generates samples and drives them gradually approach each failure domain, thus all the failure probabilities of multiple failure modes could be estimated in a single run. Two examples are investigated to demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy of the proposed improved SIS. Finally, the proposed method is applied to the structural reliability analysis of one aeronautical hydraulic pipeline structure.