Proceedings home preface contents authors keywords copyright reference ©2012 Civil-Comp Ltd				Paper 206 The Coupling of Robust Metamodel and Heuristic Methods in Reliability Based Design Optimization N. Rabhi1, M. Guedri1 and N. Bouhaddi2 1Nabeul Preparatory Engineering Institute (IPEIN), M'rezgua, Nabeul, Tunisia 2FEMTO-ST Institute UMR 6174, Applied Mechanics Laboratory R. Chaléat, University of Franche-Comté, Besançon, France Keywords: optimization, robustness, reliability, particle swarm optimization, reduced model. full paper (pdf) - reference In this paper several help tools for the decisions during the robust design of mechanical structures in an uncertain environment are established. The problem considered in this paper is the methods to obtain an optimized structure using reliability optimization, which means the optimization with regard to reliability constraints. This paper proposes a coupling of the reliability methods based on the particular swarm method [1,2] and dynamic metamodels or reduced models [3]. The first order reliability method FORM [4] is used to calculate the failure probability without using Monte Carlo simulation. The two simulation examples proposed in this paper illustrate the interest and the performance of the proposed method in the reliability based design optimization approach. The results show that the proposed method enables the calculation of the optimal uncertainty design parameters which produces the optimum mass of the structure with respect to an a priori fixed reliability index. The main conclusions of this work are: 1) a robust design is obtained by introducing a performance indicator which leads to quantifying the robustness according to the uncertainty level of the parameters, 2) the coupling of a robust reduced model and heuristic optimization method that permits the efficient reliable design of complex mechanical structures with several degrees of freedom and uncertain design parameters. References 1 J. Kennedy, R.C. Eberhart, "Particle swarm optimization", Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. on Neural Networks, 4, 1942-1948, 1995. 2 M. Clerc, J. Kennedy, "The Particle Swarm: Explosion, Stability, and Convergence in a Multi-Dimensional Complex Space", 2004. 3 M. Guedri, N. Bouhaddi, R. Majed, "Reduction of the stochastic finite element models using a robust dynamic condensation method", Journal of Sound and Vibration, 297, 123-145, 2006. 4 K. Breitung, F. Casciati, L. Faravelli, "Reliability based stability analysis for actively controlled structures", Engineering Structure, 20(3), 211-215, 1998.