LANS Informal Seminar: Andrew March

Seminar Title: Multifidelity Methods for Multidisciplinary System Design
Speaker: Andrew March, PhD candidate, MIT Department of Aeronautics & Astronautics

Date/Time: 2011-04-12 10:30
Location: Building 240, 4301

Description:
The ability to optimize complex systems using high-fidelity simulations can yield systems with unprecedented performance. Complex systems range from aircraft to integrated circuits to power systems, all of which may now be accurately simulated on a supercomputer. However, the cost of these simulations is too high for optimization to be tractable. Furthermore, the sensitivity of a system’s performance to its design variables is often not available, and the system performance estimate may vary between simulations due to the presence of uncertainties. This presentation will suggest a multifidelity framework to reduce the cost of designing systems with the most accurate simulations available. This framework progressively calibrates less expensive, lower-fidelity simulations to accelerate finding designs that are optimal with respect to the high-fidelity simulations. Novel aspects of this research are that the framework can be proven to converge to a high-fidelity optimal design even in the absence of high-fidelity sensitivity information, and that the system optimization can be parallelized.