Benchmark Problem

Surrogate model methods are widely used in structural reliability assessment, but conventional sampling methods require a large number of experimental points to construct a surrogate model. Inspired by the learning process of the AlphaGo, which is essentially optimization of sampling, we proposed a deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based sampling method for structural reliability assessment. First, the sampling space and the existing samples are transformed into an array that is treated as the state in DRL. Second, a deep neural network is designed as the agent to observe the sampling space and select new experimental points, which are treated as actions. Finally, a reward function is proposed to guide the deep neural network to select experimental points along the limit state surface. Two numerical examples including a benchmark problem are employed to illustrate the sampling ability of the proposed …