The Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering will host the 2018 Ralph Peck Lecture on Friday, April 27 at 4 p.m. in Perlstein Hall Auditorium. Marianthi Ierapetritou, professor and chair , Department of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering, Rutgers University, will discuss “A Simulation-based Decision Making Framework.” A reception will follow.

Simulations are widely used in engineering and scientific disciplines to describe realistic and complex systems and interactions. Computational advancements over the past decades have enabled the use of simulations for process analysis and optimization leading to economically viable, environmentally friendly, and safe solutions. However, there are multiple challenges in the objective of optimizing computationally expensive computer simulations.

In the pursuit of more realistic descriptions of reality, computer simulations have become computationally very expensive leading to an interesting decision making problem where information is limited. Surrogate modeling allows us to build lower fidelity models that approximate the original simulation utilizing limited data. Surrogate modeling has been an active area of research over past two decades and number of techniques exist in the literature. This talk will provide a brief introduction to widely used surrogate modeling techniques such as Kriging and radial basis functions. Ideas of how to efficiently build surrogate models utilizing adaptive sampling approaches will be also discussed. Finally, a general approach will be presented to deal with this problem and case studies describing different engineering problems will be used to illustrate the suitability of such a framework based on the work that has been done in Ierapetritou’s lab for the last 10 years.