Application of Non-linear Partial Least Squares Regression Method to Response Surface Method with Uniform Design

The response surface method(RSM) with uniform design is widely used for current structural reliability analysis of multi-dimensional variables.However,it has the limitation of fitting the regression models in the original quasi-linear least squares(LS) method.To deal with this limitation,a new approach—the partial least squares(PLS) method based on the traditional method is proposed for improvement.However,the quasi-linear regression method restricts the form of the model,thus the improvement in accuracy is limited and the result is unstable.So,this paper presents a partial least squares regression model to substitute the quasi-linear model for the calculation of reliability,which not only handles the correlation between the variables but also avoids the pre-assumptions for the form of the regression model.The results of several examples show that the method proposed in this paper can be used effectively to analyze structural reliability,especially in multi-dimensional and non-linear cases,and higher accuracy can be obtained as shown by comparing the results with those from the least squares regression method.