Using visualization tools to create kriging models

The effective use of trade space exploration requires the generation of a large number of feasible designs to permit investigation of the trade space to identify regions of interest and to understand the local tradeoffs that may exist within that region. This generation of a large number of feasible designs is often too computationally expensive to perform. The information present in a trade space can often be adequately represented with only a few points or examples, but it is difficult to interpret this information in small regions of the space with visualization tools when only a few observations are present. This work presents the use of kriging models to create surrogates to the original system analysis models and generate a large amount of surrogate designs to populate the trade space and perform trade space exploration. This work demonstrates the combination of the previously developed trade space visualization tool with new kriging model creation software. Given the graphical nature of the tool, a graphical approach to assess and update kriging approximations in regions of interest is presented. This approach allows users to leverage multi-dimensional data visualization tools to explore, understand, and identify regions of interest in the trade space. Once regions of interest have been identified, users can select points within these regions and invoke high fidelity simulation models, thereby reducing error in the surrogates.