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Various parameters including biodiesel price, capital cost, interest rate and feedstock price, may exhibit variation in the techno-economic assessments of biodiesel production within project's lifetime due to economic and technical uncertainties.

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In this paper, a surrogate‐based iterative importance sampling (IS) method is proposed to efficiently evaluate failure probability (FP) of engineering structures. The surrogate is constructed by the training points centered at the most probable failure point (MPP), which is estimated by an approximate algorithm without any additional evaluations of the real limit state function (LSF), and the IS method using the estimated MPP is further obtained; and an iterative procedure combined with the surrogate and the IS method is finally proposed to improve the accuracy of the estimated result for the FP. Three numerical examples are employed to demonstrate the accuracy of the proposed method, and further, an inside flap of an aircraft is employed to demonstrate the practical application of the proposed method in engineering problems. The results show that the reasonable estimated result of the FP within the range of 10−3‐10−5 can be evaluated by the proposed method with only hundreds of the evaluations of the real LSF.