Z. Xiang, et al.
Reliability Engineering and System Safety 199 (2020) 106901
Fig. 7. Parallel model of DRL-based sampling method.
Fig. 8. The architecture of the Artificial Neural Networks of the surrogate
model.
efficiency of the proposed DRL-based sampling method for structural
reliability assessment. The first example is a series system with two
random variables. The second example is a modified version of the first
example with adding a nonlinear term to the limit state function. For
comparison, the direct Monte Carlo simulation, a variance reduction
method (subset simulation [10]) and two surrogate modelling
approaches (AK-MCS [35] and Latin hypercube sampling [27]) are also
employed in these two examples.
4.1. Example 1:Series system reliability problem
This example considers a widely-used benchmark problem with low
nonlinearity. It is a series system with four components, and the limit
state function is defined as [35,36]:
g1 = 3 + 0.1(x1 − x2)2 − (x1 + x2)/ 2
g2 = 3 + 0.1(x1 − x2)2 + (x1 + x2)/ 2
g3 = x1 − x2 + 7/ 2
g4 = x2 − x1 + 7/ 2
g (x1, x2) = min{g1, g2 , g3, g4} (19)
where x1 and x2 are independent standard normal random variables; g1
to g4 are the limit state functions of the components; g(x1, x2) is the
system limit state function.
First, the direct Monte Carlo simulation is used to calculate the re-
ference value of failure probability. The number of Monte Carlo po-
pulations N is set to 5 × 105. Then the same Monte Carlo populations
are used to test the DRL-based sampling and Latin hypercube sampling
methods. The Monte Carlo populations and selected experimental