An efficient surrogate-based method for computing rare failure probability

In this paper, we present an efficient numerical method for evaluating rare failure probability. The method is based on a recently developed surrogate-based method from Li and Xiu [J. Li, D. Xiu, Evaluation of failure probability via surrogate models, J. Comput. Phys. 229 (2010) 8966–8980] for failure probability computation. The method by Li and Xiu is of hybrid nature, in the sense that samples of both the surrogate model and the true physical model are used, and its efficiency gain relies on using only very few samples of the true model. Here we extend the capability of the method to rare probability computation by using the idea of importance sampling (IS). In particular, we employ cross-entropy (CE) method, which is an effective method to determine the biasing distribution in IS. We demonstrate that, by combining with the CE method, a surrogate-based IS algorithm can be constructed and is highly efficient for rare failure probability computation—it incurs much reduced simulation efforts compared to the traditional CE-IS method. In many cases, the new method is capable of capturing failure probability as small as 10−12 ∼ 10−6 with only several hundreds samples.