mfEGRA: Multifidelity Efficient Global Reliability Analysis through Active Learning for Failure Boundary Location

This paper develops mfEGRA, a multifidelity active learning method using data-driven adaptively refined surrogates for failure boundary location in reliability analysis. This work addresses the issue of prohibitive cost of reliability analysis using Monte Carlo sampling for expensive-to-evaluate high-fidelity models by using cheaper-to-evaluate approximations of the high-fidelity model. The method builds on the Efficient Global Reliability Analysis (EGRA) method, which is a surrogate-based method that uses adaptive sampling for refining Gaussian process surrogates for failure boundary location using a single-fidelity model. Our method introduces a two-stage adaptive sampling criterion that uses a multifidelity Gaussian process surrogate to leverage multiple information sources with different fidelities. The method combines expected feasibility criterion from EGRA with one-step lookahead information gain to refine the surrogate around the failure boundary. The computational savings from mfEGRA depends on the discrepancy between the different models, and the relative cost of evaluating the different models as compared to the high-fidelity model. We show that accurate estimation of reliability using mfEGRA leads to computational savings of $\sim$46% for an analytic multimodal test problem and 24% for a three-dimensional acoustic horn problem, when compared to single-fidelity EGRA. We also show the effect of using a priori drawn Monte Carlo samples in the implementation for the acoustic horn problem, where mfEGRA leads to computational savings of 45% for the three-dimensional case and 48% for a rarer event four-dimensional case as compared to single-fidelity EGRA

Multifidelity Active Learning for Failure Estimation of TRISO Nuclear Fuel

The Tristructural isotropic (TRISO)-coated particle fuel is a robust nuclear fuel proposed to be used for multiple modern nuclear technologies. Therefore, characterizing its safety is vital for the reliable operation of nuclear technologies. However, the TRISO fuel failure probabilities are small and the computational model is time consuming to evaluate them using traditional Monte Carlo-type approaches. In the paper, we present a multifidelity active learning approach to efficiently estimate small failure probabilities given an expensive computational model. Active learning suggests the next best training set for optimal subsequent predictive performance and multifidelity modeling uses cheaper low-fidelity models to approximate the high-fidelity model output. After presenting the multifidelity active learning approach, we apply it to efficiently predict TRISO failure probability and make comparisons to the reference results

Optimal Model Management for Multifidelity Monte Carlo Estimation

This work presents an optimal model management strategy that exploits multifidelity surrogate models to accelerate the estimation of statistics of outputs of computationally expensive high-fidelity models. Existing acceleration methods typically exploit a multilevel hierarchy of surrogate models that follow a known rate of error decay and computational costs; however, a general collection of surrogate models, which may include projection-based reduced models, data-fit models, support vector machines, and simplified-physics models, does not necessarily give rise to such a hierarchy. Our multifidelity approach provides a framework to combine an arbitrary number of surrogate models of any type. Instead of relying on error and cost rates, an optimization problem balances the number of model evaluations across the high-fidelity and surrogate models with respect to error and costs. We show that a unique analytic solution of the model management optimization problem exists under mild conditions on the models. Our multifidelity method makes occasional recourse to the high-fidelity model; in doing so it provides an unbiased estimator of the statistics of the high-fidelity model, even in the absence of error bounds and error estimators for the surrogate models. Numerical experiments with linear and nonlinear examples show that speedups by orders of magnitude are obtained compared to Monte Carlo estimation that invokes a single model only

Scalable Environment for Quantification of Uncertainty and Optimization in Industrial Applications (SEQUOIA)

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/143027/1/6.2017-1327.pd