• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.28 no.6A
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• pp.835-842
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• 2008

The response surface method (RSM) is widely adopted for the structural reliability analysis because of its numerical efficiency. However, the RSM is still time consuming for large-scale applications and sometimes shows large errors in the calculation of sensitivity of reliability index with respect to random variables. Therefore, this study proposes a new RSM in which moving least squares (MLS) approximation is applied. Least squares approximation generally used in the common RSM gives equal weight to the coefficients of the response surface function (RSF). On the other hand, The MLS approximation gives higher weight to the experimental points closer to the design point, which yields the RSF more similar to the limit state at the design point. In the procedure of the proposed method, a linear RSF is constructed initially and then a quadratic RSF is formed using the axial experimental points selected from the reduced region where the design point is likely to exist. The RSF is updated successively by adding one more experimental point to the previously sampled experimental points. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, mathematical problems and ten-bar truss are considered as numerical examples. As a result, the proposed method shows better accuracy and computational efficiency than the common RSM.