Bi-fidelity Kriging model for reliability analysis of the ultimate strength of stiffened panels

A method based on a Bi-fidelity Kriging model is proposed for structural reliability analysis. It is based on adding low-fidelity data samples to the model to predict high-fidelity values, thus saving computational effort. Distance Correlation develops the correlation between the low and high-fidelity functions, initially proposed to assess the correlation between two variables. The bi-fidelity Kriging response surface model's efficiency as a surrogate model will be assessed for structural reliability problems that demand high computational costs, such as nonlinear finite element analysis structural models. The efficiency assessment is performed by comparing the accuracy of the failure probability predictions based on the Subset Simulation and First-order reliability method using the Bi-fidelity Kriging model as a surrogate for the performance function. The idea is illustrated by considering a representative component of marine structures analyzed by finite element analysis to create bi-fidelity scenarios to assess structural reliability with many variables. The results show that the proposed multi-fidelity method can provide an accurate failure probability estimation with less computational cost.