Model Reduction for Structural Reliability Analysis

The Focus Group “Model Reduction for Structural Reliability Analysis” involves Hans Fischer Fellow Prof. Elizabeth Qian (Georgia Institute of Technology) and her hosts Prof. Daniel Straub (Engineering Risk Analysis, TUM), Dr. Iason Papaioannou (Engineering Risk Analysis, TUM) and Prof. Elisabeth Ullmann (Scientific Computing and Uncertainty Quantification, TUM).

Structural reliability analysis aims to quantify the probability of structural failure, an essential task in reliability and risk assessment for engineering structures and systems. Because failure events have low probability, standard sampling-based Monte Carlo methods for quantifying uncertainties require a large number of samples, making reliability analysis prohibitively expensive for many applications where the system model is high-dimensional and expensive to evaluate. This project will develop new efficient approaches to structural reliability analysis using projection-based reduced models, which are cheap, low-dimensional approximations to high-dimensional models that reflect the structure of the governing equations of the physical system. The Focus Group will develop new efficient computational approaches to reliability analysis based on both existing reduced modeling methods and new reduced modeling methods tailored to the reliability analysis setting. The research will span the development of new methods, mathematical analysis of the methods, and practical demonstration of the computational benefits of the proposed approaches on real-world applications.

Prof. Qian holds a TUM-IAS Hans Fischer Fellowship funded by the TUM Georg Nemetschek Institute.