ANFIS method for ultimate strength prediction of unstiffened plates with pitting corrosion

Increasing attention has recently been paid to the effects of localised pitting corrosion on the ultimate strength of marine structures. In this paper, an adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) method was developed to predict the ultimate strength reduction of steel plates with pitting corrosion subjected to uniaxial in-plane compressive loads. Published ultimate strength data-sets for unstiffened plates affected by pitting corrosion were used to train and test a series of ANFIS models composed of several input variables. To develop the best accurate model, rule-based fuzzy sets were used for mapping the inputs to the output using seven different types of membership functions. The two-sided Gaussian-type function was found to be more effective and less sensitive to the sample size than other functions tested. The developed method provided good estimates (maximum RMSE of 0.019) in comparison with published results obtained using the finite element and artificial neural network methods.