Surface decomposition method for sensitivity analysis of first-passage dynamic reliability of linear systems

This work presents a novel surface decomposition method for the sensitivity analysis of first-passage dynamic reliability of linear systems subjected to Gaussian random excitations. The method decomposes the sensitivity of first-passage failure probability into a sum of surface integrals over the constrained component limit-state hypersurfaces. The evaluation of these surface integrals can be accomplished, owing to the availability of closed-form linear expressions of both the component limit-state functions and their sensitivities for linear systems. An importance sampling strategy is introduced to further enhance the efficiency for estimating the sum of these surface integrals. The number of function evaluations required for the reliability sensitivity analysis is typically on the order of 10^2 to 10^3. The approach is particularly advantageous when a large number of design parameters are considered, as the results of function evaluations can be reused across different parameters. Two numerical examples are investigated to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.