Uncertainty assessment of complex models with application to aviation environmental systems

Numerical simulation models that support decision-making and policy-making processes are often complex, involving many disciplines, and long computation times. These models typically have many factors of different character, such as operational, design-based, technological, and economics-based. Such factors generally contain uncertainty, which leads to uncertainty in model outputs. For such models, it is critical to both the application of model results and the future development of the model that uncertainty be properly assessed. This thesis presents a comprehensive approach to the uncertainty assessment of complex models intended to support decision- and policy-making processes. The approach consists of seven steps, which are establishing assessment goals, documenting assumptions and limitations, documenting model factors and outputs, classifying and characterizing factor uncertainty, conducting uncertainty analysis, conducting sensitivity analysis, and presenting results. Factor uncertainty is represented probabilistically, characterized by the principle of maximum uncertainty, and propagated via Monte Carlo simulation. State-of-the-art methods of global sensitivity analysis are employed to apportion model output variance across model factors, and a fundamental extension of global sensitivity analysis, termed distributional sensitivity analysis, is developed to determine on which factors future research should focus to reduce output variability.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2009

Author dc:creator

• Allaire, Douglas L

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Karen E. Willcox.

• Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/50601

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/50601