Technical Paper
Reliability Analysis of Systems with Nonlinear Limit States; Application to Automotive Door Closing Effort
2003-03-03
2003-01-0142
In this paper, an efficient method for the reliability analysis of systems with nonlinear limit states is described. It combines optimization-based and simulation-based approaches and is particularly applicable for problems with highly nonlinear and implicit limit state functions, which are difficult to solve by conventional reliability methods. The proposed method consists of two major parts. In the first part, an optimization-based method is used to search for the most probable point (MPP) on the limit state. This is achieved by using adaptive response surface approximations. In the second part, a multi-modal adaptive importance sampling method is proposed using the MPP information from the first part as the starting point. The proposed method is applied to the reliability estimation of a vehicle body-door subsystem with respect to one of the important quality issues -- the door closing effort.