Quantifying Uncertainty
Ganapathysubramanian, B. and Zabaras, N.. "A seamless approach towards stochastic modeling: Sparse grid collocation and data driven input models" Finite Elements in Analysis and Design. 44
(5).
2008.
pp. 298--320.
Many physical systems of fundamental and industrial importance are significantly affected by the underlying fluctuations/variations in boundary, initial conditions as well as variabilities in operating and surrounding conditions. There has been increasing interest in analyzing and quantifying the effects of uncertain inputs in the solution of partial differential equations that describe these physical phenomena. Such analysis naturally leads to a rigorous methodology to design/control physical processes in the presence of multiple sources of uncertainty. A general application of these ideas to many significant problems in engineering is mainly limited by two issues. The first is the significant effort required to convert complex deterministic software/legacy codes into their stochastic counterparts. The second bottleneck to the utility of stochastic modeling is the construction of realistic, viable models of the input variability. This work attempts to demystify stochastic modeling by providing easy-to-implement strategies to address these two issues. In the first part of the paper, strategies to construct realistic input models that encode the variabilities in initial and boundary conditions as well as other parameters are provided. In the second part of the paper, we review recent advances in stochastic modeling and provide a road map to trivially convert any deterministic code into its stochastic counterpart. Several illustrative examples showcasing the ease of converting deterministic codes to stochastic codes are provided.
Ghanmi, S., Bouazizi, M.-L., and Bouhaddi, N.. "Robustness of mechanical systems against uncertainties" Finite Elements in Analysis and Design. 43
(9).
2007.
pp. 715--731.
In this paper, one can propose a method which takes into account the propagation of uncertainties in the finite element models in a multi-objective optimization procedure. This method is based on the coupling of stochastic response surface method (SRSM) and a genetic algorithm provided with a new robustness criterion. The SRSM is based on the use of stochastic finite element method (SFEM) via the use of the polynomial chaos expansion (PC). Thus, one can avoid the use of Monte Carlo simulation (MCS) whose costs become prohibitive in the optimization problems, especially when the finite element models are large and have a considerable number of design parameters. The objective of this study is on one hand to quantify efficiently the effects of these uncertainties on the responses variability or the cost functions which one wishes to optimize and on the other hand, to calculate solutions which are both optimal and robust with respect to the uncertainties of design parameters. In order to study the propagation of input uncertainties on the mechanical structure responses and the robust multi-objective optimization with respect to these uncertainty, two numerical examples were simulated. The results which relate to the quantification of the uncertainty effects on the responses variability were compared with those obtained by the reference method (REF) using MCS and with those of the deterministic response surfaces methodology (RSM). In the same way, the robust multi-objective optimization results resulting from the SRSM method were compared with those obtained by the direct optimization considered as reference (REF) and with RSM methodology. The SRSM method application to the response variability study and the robust multi-objective optimization gave convincing results.