A System Uncertainty Propagation Approach With Model Uncertainty Quantification in Multidisciplinary Design

Abstract

The performance of a multidisciplinary system is inevitably affected by various sources of uncertainties, usually categorized as aleatory (e.g. input variability) or epistemic (e.g. model uncertainty) uncertainty. In the framework of design under uncertainty, all sources of uncertainties should be aggregated to assess the uncertainty of system quantities of interest (QOIs). In a multidisciplinary design system, uncertainty propagation refers to the analysis that quantifies the overall uncertainty of system QOIs resulting from all sources of aleatory and epistemic uncertainty originating in the individual disciplines. However, due to the complexity of multidisciplinary simulation, especially the coupling relationships between individual disciplines, many uncertainty propagation approaches in the existing literature only consider aleatory uncertainty and ignore the impact of epistemic uncertainty. In this paper, we address the issue of efficient uncertainty quantification of system QOIs considering both aleatory and epistemic uncertainties. We propose a spatial-random-process (SRP) based multidisciplinary uncertainty analysis (MUA) method that, subsequent to SRP-based disciplinary model uncertainty quantification, fully utilizes the structure of SRP emulators and leads to compact analytical formulas for assessing statistical moments of uncertain QOIs. The proposed method is applied to a benchmark electronics packaging problem. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the method, the estimated low-order statistical moments of the QOIs are compared to the results from Monte Carlo simulations.