From Surrogate Modelling to Aerospace Engineering: a NASA Case Study

This is how Surrogate Modelling is revolutionizing the world of Aerospace Engineering, from theory to practice

Image made by author using DALL·E

Imagine that you are going to the doctor because you have abdominal pain. Imagine that, in order to tell you the reason for your pain, the doctor needs to run a numerical simulation. This numerical simulation solves the differential equation of your body and the approximation error is so low that it results in basically 100% accuracy: you will know exactly why you have that abdominal pain, with no room for error at all (I know this sounds crazy, but bear with me here). Would you use the numerical simulation? Of course you would, why not?

Now imagine that, because this numerical simulation solves very complicated differential equations, to get the response from the computer you need to wait 35 years of GPU runtime. This would immediately drop the attractiveness of the method. What is the use of this method if it takes so long to get the response out of it? Sure, it might be 100% accurate, but the computational cost to pay is too large.

Well, engineers thought of a solution. This solution is called surrogate modelling. As the name says, the approach is to use a surrogate of the original simulation…