Multiscale Structural Reliability Analysis in high dimensions with Tensor Trains and Physics-Augmented Neural Networks

TL;DR

This paper presents a scalable framework combining physics-augmented neural networks and tensor train methods to efficiently evaluate high-dimensional structural failure probabilities in composite materials.

Contribution

It introduces a novel coupling of VRNN and DIRT methods to address high-dimensional uncertainty propagation in multiscale structural reliability analysis.

Findings

Framework achieves low-variance failure probability estimates up to 150 dimensions.

Couples VRNN with DIRT for fast, physically consistent homogenized stiffness evaluation.

Demonstrated on a 3D heterogeneous benchmark with Bayesian microscale uncertainties.

Abstract

Structural reliability evaluation for composites constitutes a fundamentally high-dimensional multiscale problem, as microscale material uncertainties must propagate to the macroscale and can be quantified as high-dimensional random fields. Conventional approaches are computationally intractable, as they rely on repeatedly solving coupled partial differential equation systems across scales while contending with the exponential complexity inherent in high-dimensional uncertainty quantification. This work introduces a scalable and physically consistent framework that addresses both bottlenecks simultaneously in the case of separation of scales and (anisotropic) linear elasticity. In particular, we couple a physics-augmented Voigt--Reuss Neural Network (VRNN) with the Deep Inverse Rosenblatt Transport (DIRT) method to estimate the posterior probability of structural failure. The VRNN is used to resolve the computationally expensive FE$^2$ scheme by providing a near-instantaneous evaluation of the homogenized stiffness tensor that is guaranteed to be symmetric, positive-definite, and strictly bounded within the Voigt--Reuss limits, enabling fast evaluation of the homogenized responses. The DIRT method constructs a sequence of functional tensor train approximations to efficiently store an approximation of the high-dimensional optimal importance sampling distribution for estimating the probability of failure. This mitigates the curse of dimensionality arising from the Karhunen--Lo\`eve expansion of the random fields. The framework is demonstrated on a three-dimensional heterogeneous benchmark problem, where the uncertainty in the microscale material properties is characterized by a Bayesian posterior distribution obtained from limited strain observations. Our results show that the proposed framework can provide low-variance estimates of failure probabilities in dimensions up to 150.