Building Surrogate Models Based on Detailed and Approximate Simulations

Preliminary design of a complex system often involves exploring a broad design space. This may require repeated use of computationally expensive simulations. To ease the computational burden, surrogate models are built to provide rapid approximations of more expensive models. However, the surrogate models themselves are often expensive to build because they are based on repeated experiments with computationally expensive simulations. An alternative approach is to replace the detailed simulations with simplified approximate simulations, thereby sacrificing accuracy for reduced computational time. Naturally, surrogate models built from these approximate simulations will also be imprecise. A strategy is needed for improving the precision of surrogate models based on approximate simulations without significantly increasing computational time. In this paper, a new approach is taken to integrate data from approximate and detailed simulations to build a surrogate model that describes the relationship between output and input parameters. Experimental results from approximate simulations form the bulk of the data, 1 Professor and Corresponding Author Phone: (404)385-4262; Fax: (404)894-2301; Email: [email protected]