Response Surface Mesh with the Outer Input Method

Abstract

Artificial intelligence in general and optimization tasks applied to the design of aerospace, space,and automotive structures, rely on response surfaces to forecast the output of functions, and are vital part of these methodologies. Yet they have important limitations, since greater precisions require greater data sets, thus, training or updating larger response surfaces become computationally expensive, sometimes unfeasible. This has been a bottle neck limitation to achieve more promising results, rendering many AI related task with a low efficiency.To solve this challenge, a new methodology created to segment response surfaces is hereby presented. Differently than other similar methodologies, the novel algorithm here presented named outer input method, has a very simple and robust operation. With only one operational parameter, maximum element size, it efficiently generates a near isopopulated mesh for any data set with any type of distribution, such as random, Cartesian, or clustered, for domains with any number of coordinates.Thus, it is possible to simplify the response surfaces by generating an ensemble of response surfaces, here denominated response surface mesh. This study demonstrates how a metamodel denominated Kriging, trained with a large data set, can be simplified with a response surface mesh, significantly reducing its often expensive computation costs> experiments here presented achieved an speed increase up to 180 times, while using a dual core parallel processingcomputer. This methodology can be applied to any metamodel, and metamodel elements can be easily parallelized and updated individually. Thus, its already faster training operation has its speed increased.