GAUSSIAN PROCESS RESPONSE SURFACE MODELING AND GLOBAL SENSITIVITY ANALYSIS USING NESSUS

NESSUS is a general-purpose software program for probabilistic analysis that includes state-of-the-art algorithms, flexible methods for interfacing with external numerical models, and a mature graphical user interface. NESSUS was originally developed for NASA under a long-term research and development program to develop methods and tools for reliability analysis of space shuttle main engine components. In the past few years, recent NESSUS development has focused on the incorporation of advanced response surface modeling and global sensitivity analysis methods. NESSUS now includes a variety of tools for building and analyzing Gaussian Process (GP) models. This includes general-purpose GP response surface models as well as the Efficient Global Reliability Analysis (EGRA) method, which uses adaptive sampling to target surrogate model accuracy in the vicinity of the limit state. In addition, several methods have been implemented into NESSUS for the calculation of variance-based sensitivity indices, including sampling-based methods and analytical solutions based on response surface models. This paper gives an overview of these recent enhancements. In particular, we introduce the NESSUS Response Surface Toolkit (RST), which is a recently released standalone software application included with NESSUS for building, visualizing, and assessing response surface models. 225 Available online at www.eccomasproceedia.org Eccomas Proceedia UNCECOMP (2017) 225-237 ©2017 The Authors. Published by Eccomas Proceedia. Peer-review under responsibility of the organizing committee of UNCECOMP 2017. doi: 10.7712/120217.5365.16997 John M. McFarland, John A. Dimeo, and Barron J. Bichon