Model Discrepancy Quantification in Simulation-Based Design of Dynamical Systems

Discrete-time state-space models have been extensively used in simulation-based design of dynamical systems. These prediction models may not accurately represent the true physics of a dynamical system due to potentially flawed understanding of the system, missing physics, and/or numerical approximations. To improve the validity of these models at new design locations, this paper proposes a novel dynamic model discrepancy quantification (DMDQ) framework. Time-instantaneous prediction models are constructed for the model discrepancies of “hidden” state variables, and are used to correct the discrete-time prediction models at each time-step. For discrete-time models, the hidden state variables and their discrepancies are coupled over two adjacent time steps. Also, the state variables cannot be directly measured. These factors complicate the construction of the model discrepancy prediction models. The proposed DMDQ framework overcomes these challenges by proposing two discrepancy modeling approaches: an estimation-modeling approach and a modeling-estimation approach. The former first estimates the model discrepancy and then builds a nonparametric prediction model of the model discrepancy; the latter builds a parametric prediction model of the model discrepancy first and then estimates the parameters of the prediction model. A subsampling method is developed to reduce the computational effort in building the two types of prediction models. A mathematical example and an electrical circuit dynamical system demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed DMDQ framework and highlight the advantages and disadvantages of the proposed approaches.