DARPA Seeks Mathematical Tools to Measure Uncertainty in Design Models; Fariba Fahroo Comments

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency wants to apply mathematical methods to quantify and predict uncertainty in design models used to build military systems.

DARPA wants to propagate and handle various sources of uncertainty in design models using mathematical tools under the Enabling Quantification of Uncertainty in Physical Systems program, the agency said Thursday.

“In recent decades, the field of uncertainty quantification has made significant progress dealing with what is known as the ‘forward problem,’ which refers to propagating input uncertainties through a computational model,” said Fariba Fahroo, DARPA program manager.

Fahroo added these methodologies are currently limited to handling “forward problems for a small number of uncertain parameters.”

“Dealing with the ‘curse of dimensionality’ where the associated computational cost grows exponentially as a function of the number of random variables remains a major challenge in simulation and design under uncertainty,” Fahroo said.