An improved response surface method for the determination of failure probability and importance measures

The problem of response surface modeling of limit surface lying within two hyper spheres of prescribed radii is considered. The relevance of this problem in structural reliability analysis involving performance functions with multiple design points and/or multiple regions that make significant contributions to failure probability is discussed. The paper also proposes global measures of sensitivity of failure probability with respect to the basic random variables. The performance of the proposed improvements is examined by comparing simulation based results with results from the proposed procedure with reference to two specific structural reliability analysis problems. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.