View article

Probabilistic design, such as reliability-based design and robust design, offers tools for making reliable decisions with the consideration of uncertainty associated with design variables/parameters and simulation models. Since a probabilistic optimization often involves a double-loop procedure for the overall optimization and iterative probabilistic assessment, the computational demand is extremely high. In this paper, the sequential optimization and reliability assessment (SORA) is developed to improve the efficiency of probabilistic optimization. The SORA method employs a single-loop strategy with a serial of cycles of deterministic optimization and reliability assessment. In each cycle, optimization and reliability assessment are decoupled from each other; the reliability assessment is only conducted after the deterministic optimization to verify constraint feasibility under uncertainty. The key to the proposed method is …