N -Dimensional Nonuniform Rational B-Splines for Metamodeling

Abstract

Nonuniform rational B-splines (NURBs) have unique properties that make them attractive for engineering metamodeling applications. NURBs are known to accurately model many different continuous curve and surface topologies in one- and two-variate spaces. However, engineering metamodels of the design space often require hypervariate representations of multidimensional outputs. In essence, design space metamodels are hyperdimensional constructs with a dimensionality determined by their input and output variables. To use NURBs as the basis for a metamodel in a hyperdimensional space, traditional geometric fitting techniques must be adapted to hypervariate and hyperdimensional spaces composed of both continuous and discontinuous variable types. In this paper, we describe the necessary adaptations for the development of a NURBs-based metamodel called a hyperdimensional performance model or HyPerModel. HyPerModels are capable of accurately and reliably modeling nonlinear hyperdimensional objects defined by both continuous and discontinuous variables of a wide variety of topologies, such as those that define typical engineering design spaces. We demonstrate this ability by successfully generating accurate HyPerModels of ten trial functions laying the foundation for future work with N-dimensional NURBs in design space applications.