Debiased Multifidelity Approach to Surrogate Modeling in Aerospace Applications

We propose a multifidelity formulation for generating cokriging surrogates of complex physics models. First, we show that the standard autoregressive recursive approach may be subject to substantial limitations due to possible modeler’s biases/errors. These are inherent to the process of establishing a nested hierarchy concerning the alleged fidelity of the available models. The formulation we propose mitigates this issue. At each hierarchy level, the predictor consists of a linear combination of all previous levels instead of just the underlying one. The methodology implies a slightly higher training cost for the surrogate. However, the higher training cost is acceptable, considering the effort typically required to generate data in aerospace applications. A few artificial tests, including the optimization of a two-dimensional airfoil, illustrate strengths and weaknesses of the approach.