Framework for Comparison of Multi-Fidelity Approaches for Military Vehicle Design

This paper overviews the efforts of the AVT-331 technical team under the NATO Applied Vehicle Technology Panel, which is studying multi-fidelity methods through application to vehicle design. The objectives of the team are to understand the potential benefits of multi-fidelity methods in vehicle design and to document the relative strengths and weaknesses of different multi-fidelity methods using a common benchmark suite developed by the team. The benchmark suite has multiple levels of complexity, beginning with analytic functions with well-understood properties and culminating with representative air and sea vehicle benchmarks. The suite also includes intermediate complexity benchmarks of relevance to air, sea, and space vehicles. Benchmark features are catalogued herein, including descriptions of benchmark objectives and enabling software needed to reproduce vehicle-level results, as well as experimental setup for analytic benchmarks. The principal multi-fidelity methods utilized across the team are summarized and the extensive array of papers published by AVT-331 are tabulated. This tabulation documents the mapping between method employed and problem studied. Lastly, the process is described by which the relative strengths and weaknesses of different multi-fidelity methods is assessed over eight assessment categories. Multi-fidelity results are not included in this paper, but are separately detailed in four workshop papers. Team assessments will be documented in the AVT-331 final report.