A new multi-fidelity surrogate modelling method for engineering design based on neural network and transfer learning

Purpose Compared with the low-fidelity model, the high-fidelity model has both the advantage of high accuracy, and the disadvantage of low efficiency and high cost. A series of multi-fidelity surrogate modelling method were developed to give full play to the respective advantages of both low-fidelity and high-fidelity models. However, most multi-fidelity surrogate modelling methods are sensitive to the amount of high-fidelity data. The purpose of this paper is to propose a multi fidelity surrogate modelling method whose accuracy is less dependent on the amount of high-fidelity data. Design/methodology/approach A multi-fidelity surrogate modelling method based on neural networks was proposed in this paper, which utilizes transfer learning ideas to explore the correlation between different fidelity datasets. A low-fidelity neural network was built by using a sufficient amount of low-fidelity data, which was then finetuned by a very small amount of HF data to obtain a multi-fidelity neural network based on this correlation. Findings Numerical examples were used in this paper, which proved the validity of the proposed method, and the influence of neural network hyper-parameters on the prediction accuracy of the multi-fidelity model was discussed. Originality/value Through the comparison with existing methods, case study shows that when the number of high-fidelity sample points is very small, the R -square of the proposed model exceeds the existing model by more than 0.3, which shows that the proposed method can be applied to reducing the cost of complex engineering design problems.