Active learning for structural reliability: survey, general framework and benchmark

Active learning methods have recently surged in the literature due to their ability to solve complex structural reliability problems within an affordable computational cost. These methods are designed by adaptively building an inexpensive surrogate of the original limit-state function. Examples of such surrogates include Gaussian process models which have been adopted in many contributions, the most popular ones being the efficient global reliability analysis (EGRA) and the active Kriging Monte Carlo simulation (AK-MCS), two milestone contributions in the field. In this paper, we first conduct a survey of the recent literature, showing that most of the proposed methods actually span from modifying one or more aspects of the two aforementioned methods. We then propose a generalized modular framework to build on-the-fly efficient active learning strategies by combining the following four ingredients or modules: surrogate model, reliability estimation algorithm, learning function and stopping criterion. Using this framework, we devise 39 strategies for the solution of 20 reliability benchmark problems. The results of this extensive benchmark (more than 12,000 reliability problems solved) are analyzed under various criteria leading to a synthesized set of recommendations for practitioners. These may be refined with a priori knowledge about the feature of the problem to solve, i.e. dimensionality and magnitude of the failure probability. This benchmark has eventually highlighted the importance of using surrogates in conjunction with sophisticated reliability estimation algorithms as a way to enhance the efficiency of the latter.