Multiscale Structural Reliability Analysis in high dimensions with Tensor Trains and Physics-Augmented Neural Networks
For engineers analyzing composite materials, this provides a tractable approach to high-dimensional uncertainty quantification that was previously computationally intractable.
This work introduces a scalable framework for high-dimensional multiscale structural reliability analysis, coupling a physics-augmented neural network with tensor train approximations to estimate failure probabilities. The method achieves low-variance estimates in dimensions up to 150 on a 3D benchmark problem.
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--Loève 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.